Apart from the lavish costliness of its materials the actual Temple was architecturally a poor and commonplace structure. It was quite small--only 90 feet long, 35 feet broad, and 45 feet high. It was meant for the symbolic habitation of God, not for the worship of great congregations. It only represented the nascent art and limited resources of a tenth-rate kingdom, and was totally devoid alike of the pure and stately beauty of the Parthenon and the awe-inspiring grandeur of the great Egyptian temples with their avenues of obelisks and sphinxes and their colossal statues of deities and kings "Staring right on with calm, eternal eyes." When Justinian boastfully exclaimed, as he looked at his church, "_I have vanquished thee, O Solomon_,"[249] and when the Khalif Omar, pointing to the Dome of the Rock, murmured, "_Behold, a greater than Solomon is here,_" they forgot the vast differences between them and the Jewish king in the epoch at which they lived and the resources which they could command. The Temple was built in "majestic silence." "No workman's axe, no ponderous hammer rung, Like some tall palm the noiseless fabric sprung." This was due to religious reverence. It could be easily accomplished, because each stone and beam was carefully prepared to be fitted in its exact place before it was carried up the Temple hill. The elaborate particulars furnished us of the measurements of Solomon's Temple are too late in age, too divergent in particulars, too loosely strung together, too much mingled with later reminiscences, and altogether too architecturally insufficient, to enable us to re-construct the exact building, or even to form more than a vague conception of its external appearance. Both in Kings and Chronicles the notices, as Keil says, are "incomplete extracts made independently of one another," and vague in essential details. Critics and architects have attempted to reproduce the Temple on Greek,[250] Egyptian,[251] and Phœnician[252] models, so entirely unlike each other as to show that we can arrive at no certainty.[253] It is, however, most probable that, alike in ornamentation and conception, the building was predominantly Phœnician.[254] Severe in outline, gorgeous in detail, it was more like the Temple of Venus-Astarte at Paphos than any other. Fortunately the details, apart from such dim symbolism as we may detect in them, have no religious importance, but only an historic and antiquarian interest.[255]