It was built on nothing but the soil of the place, and was erected over nothing; the foundations go down for one foot below the floor of cement which covered the enclosure, and it has been preserved to us simply by its solidity, its long through stones, and the way in which the stones have supported one another. We investigated the smaller tower very thoroughly, and found it also solid. The religious purport of these towers would seem to be conclusively proved by the numerous finds we made in other parts of the ruins of a phallic nature (vide Chap. VI.), and I think a quotation from Montfaucon’s ‘L’Antiquité Expliquée’ will give us the keynote of the worship. ‘The ancients assure us that all the Arabians worshipped a tower, which they called El Acara or Alquetila, which was built by their patriarch, Ishmael.’ ‘Maximus of Tyre says they honoured as a great god a great cut stone; this is apparently the same stone resembling Venus, according to Euthymius Zygabenus. When the Saracens were converted to Christianity they were obliged to anathematise this stone, which formerly they worshipped.’ This tower doubtless corresponded to the sacred tower of the Midianites, called Penuel, or the ‘Face of God,’ which Gideon destroyed (Judges viii. 7). Allusions to these towers are constant in the Bible, and the Arabian historian El Masoudi further tells us that this stone or tower was eight cubits high, and was placed in an angle of the temple, which had no roof. Turning to Phœnician temple construction, we have a good parallel to the ruins of the Great Zimbabwe at Byblos; as depicted on the coins, the tower or sacred cone is set up within the temple precincts and shut off in an enclosure (vide illustration, p. 150). Similar work is also found in the round temples of the Cabiri, at Hadjar Kem in Malta, and the construction of these buildings bears a remarkable resemblance to that of those at Zimbabwe, and the round towers, or nuraghs, found in Sardinia may possibly be of similar significance. MM. Perrot and Chipiez, in their ‘History of Art in Sardinia,’ speak of these nuraghs as forts or temples, around which the primitive inhabitants of the island once lived. They are ‘truncated cones, built with stone blocks of different sizes, narrowing to the top. The stones are unhewn as a rule and laid on without mortar.’ Here too we have a parallel for our monoliths, menhirs of unhewn stone, and also for the phalli, specimens of which are found carved on stone (p. 57, figs. 49 and 50), and here too the intricate plan of the fortresses suggests at once a parallel to those at Zimbabwe; hence it would appear that the same influence was at work in Sardinia as in South Africa. In Lucian’s ‘De Syriâ Deâ,’ which we shall have occasion again to quote when discussing our finds in Chapter VI., we find a description of a temple at Hierapolis, in Mesopotamia, in the propylæa of which, he tells us (§ 16), ‘there stood