To obtain any idea of them, we must quit the mother country, and betake ourselves to the colonies, especially to those island colonies which have been less subjected than the mainland to the destructive ravages of barbarous conquerors, and the iconoclasm of fanatical populations.

It is especially in Cyprus that we meet with extensive remains, which, if not so instructive as might have been wished, yet give us some important and interesting information.
The temple of Paphos, according to the measurements of General Di Cesnola,[625] was a rectangular building, 221 feet long by 167 feet wide, built along its lower corners of large blocks of stone, but probably continued above in an inferior material, either wood or unbaked brick.[626] The four corner-stones are still standing in their proper places, and give the dimensions without a possibility of mistake.
Nothing is known of the internal arrangements, unless we attach credit to the views of the savant Gerhard, who, in the early years of the present century, constructed a plan from the reports of travellers, in which he divided the building into a nave and two aisles, with an ante-chapel in front, and a sacrarium at the further extremity.[627] M.
Gerhard also added, beyond the sacrarium, an apse, of which General Di Cesnola found no traces, but which may possibly have disappeared in the course of the sixty years which separated the observations of M.
Gerhard's informants from the researches of the later traveller.
The arrangement into a nave and two aisles is, to a certain extent, confirmed by some of the later Cyprian coins, which certainly represent Cyprian temples, and probably the temple of Paphos.[628] The floor of the temple was, in part at any rate, covered with mosaic.[629] This large building, which extended over an area of 36,800 square feet, was emplaced within a sacred court, surrounded by a _peribolus_, or wall of enclosure, built of even larger blocks than the temple itself, and entered by at least one huge doorway.

The width of this entrance, situated near a corner of the western wall, was nearly eighteen feet.[630] On one side of it were found still fixed in the wall the sockets for the bolts on which the door swung, in length six inches, and of proportionate width and depth.

The peribolus was rectangular, like the temple, and was built in lines parallel to it.

The longer sides measured 690 and the shorter 530 feet.