Excerpt from Malta and the Knights Hospitallers Hagiar Kim - the stone of Veneration - is the most accessible and best preserved of these vestiges of hoary eld. We can only carry back its modern history to the excavation in the year 1839, when the soil and stones accumulated during centuries of neglect were first cleared away with unfortunately hardly adequate precaution - nevertheless the seven statuettes of sandstone, preserved in the museum at Valletta, were found here - images which are identified with the Kabiri, worshipped in Lemnos as the ancient workers in metal - though these, figures fat as Tunisian Jewesses, seated on the ground like Chinese poussahs, headless, but with holes and sockets which indicate that a nodding neck was fitted into the vacant place, have assuredly, as M. Darcel notes, more to do with Ceres than with Vulcan, with abundance and fertility than with subterranean toil. There is also preserved in the museum an altar, and the sacred slab ornamented with an egg-shaped figure between two volutes symbolising the Universe. Later excavations carried out by the Director of Education, Dr. Caruana, have developed the complete plan of the temple, and ascertained the mode of its construction. The gigantic slabs of stone employed in the external walls, and the traces of the oracular chamber, the enclosures for the animals used in sacrifice, and other details, plainly connect it with the Sidonian period of architecture and worship; and the discovery of a little image of Astarte (astaroth) supplies a link of additional certainty. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.