From this court three gates led through a group of buildings to the Court of Israel. The principal one of these gates, celebrated as the Nicanor Gate, had doors of Corinthian bronze, and was of beautiful architectural proportions and rich construction. The Court of Israel, which was reserved for men who had performed certain acts of purification, was eleven cubits wide. The halls surrounding it on three sides, which had façades furnished with porticoes, were appendages of the divine cult. Each was consecrated to a special service. Here the skins of victims were salted and washed; the musical instruments, the salt, the eternal fire, the wood were kept here; and here was the hall of the sanhedrim. Finally came the Court of the Priests, in the middle of which were the temple proper and the altar of burnt offerings. The temple stood on a terrace six cubits high, so that there was thus a difference of level of eight and a half metres between the platform of the temple and the Court of the Gentiles. Its architectural features were essentially the same as those of Solomon’s temple. This temple of the Jews was one of the most majestic works of architecture that antiquity produced. The succession of enclosed courts rising one above another and crowned by the gigantic white marble pylons of the sanctuary is a conception of genius that was realised only here, and all antiquity had but one voice in praise of its imposing grandeur. The House of the Eternal was embellished with an unprecedented luxury. Costly woods, gold, silver, ivory, precious stones even--nothing was spared by this people that was so jealous of its God. The accessories of the cult, moreover, sacred vessels, knives, basins, utensils of every kind, were works in which caster and engraver vied with one another in the display of their art. But it must not be forgotten that the artists who decorated the ancient temple were Phœnicians; and as the Phœnicians always limited themselves to imitation of the Egyptians and the Assyrians, their technique has a hybrid character, which, like Syria itself from a geographical point of view, is a sort of compromise between Asia and Egypt.[d] The race which had so little influence on the art of the world and so much upon its literature, religion, commerce, and destinies, has had the strangest of all national fates. To the Christian it is as the escape of the soul from the corruption and death of the body. Newman[e] has thus closed his _History of the Hebrew Monarchy_, in words that may fitly serve as finis here: