The functions of the Μάστροι, mentioned in the first and last lines, have been described by me in the earlier part of this memoir.
According to the fragment of Ergeias in Athenæus to which I have already referred, there was a Phœnician settlement at Acliaia, in Rhodes, governed by Phalanthos, which was taken after a long siege by the Greek settler, Iphiklos. According to another tradition, preserved by Diodoros, v. 58, Kadmos, having dedicated a temenos to Poseidon, in Rhodes, left some Phœnicians there to have care of it, and these united with the lalysians in one community. He adds that the priests in Ialysos are said to have traced the descent of their hereditary priesthood up to these Phœnician settlers.
It seems at first sight a plausible theory to connect the worship of the solar deity Alektrona at Ialysos with the Phœnician worship of Baal, and the strictness with which all that was unclean was debarred access to her temenos, seems to indicate a Semitic source for the ritual, which the expression κατὰ τὰ πάτρια shows to have been handed down from remote times. Such a connection with an earlier Semitic religion seems more clearly indicated by the human sacrifices, which, according to Porphyry, De abstin. II. § 54, were anciently offered in Rhodes to Kronos, and of which the barbarity was in after times mitigated by the substitution of a criminal whose life was already forfeit to the law for the victim of earlier times. But we hardly know enough yet either of Greek or of Semitic ritual to establish traces of a connection between them. I would observe in conclusion that this stelè was found by Mr. Consul
