Part 23

Haifa, March 15.—There is no part of ancient Palestine which offers a more fertile field for antiquarian research than that portion lying to the east of the Jordan, which fell to the share of the half-tribe of Manasseh. In Biblical times a part of it was called Golan, and its modern name of Jaulan is almost identical with its ancient appellation. It is to this day the finest grazing land in all Palestine, as it was in the days of old, when Job fed his vast flocks and herds upon its more eastern pastures, but it is now very sparsely inhabited. The sedentary population has all been driven away by the wandering tribes of Bedouins who have appropriated the country; the very few villages that remain are squalid and miserable, and the inhabitants live in terror for their lives, for they never know what day, or rather night, the Arabs may not be down upon them, and carry off their stock. They surround their houses, therefore, with large yards enclosed by stone walls, and it was in one of these that I found a lodging on the night that I had so nearly been obliged to spend in the wilds of the Wady Samak. Attached to these yards are large stone vaults, capable of containing great herds of cattle, and some of them apparently of great antiquity. In the one in which I staked my horses I found, on examining it in the morning, part of a Corinthian column, still _in situ_, standing to a height of about six feet. I failed to discover any more, but the vault was so dark that my examination was carried on with difficulty, and I had no time to spend over it. The sheik's house in which I lodged, and to which this vault belonged, was evidently, however, built on the site of what had formerly been a building of some importance, for in the yard, to my surprise and delight, I came upon a prostrate statue of a woman, life size. The head was severed from the body, and the feet had been broken off at the ankles, but it was a fine specimen of Greek statuary. Both the features and the drapery were beautifully executed. The feet I found _in situ_, the ankles just appearing on a level with the ground. On clearing this away I laid bare the feet, which were still firmly fixed on the original pedestal, which it would have required a great deal of labour to disinter. It is not improbable that the pedestal is covered with carving in _basso-rilievo_, and I promise myself at some future time to dig it up. In the meantime both feet and pedestal cannot be safer than where they are, more especially as my companions secured the head. This the sheik was induced to part with for $3. The body was too cumbersome to carry away now, as a camel would have been needed for its transport, and, as it is not of much value without the head, it may be considered secured by the possession of that portion.

The statue apparently represented Artemis, as the left arm clasped what seemed to be a quiver for arrows. The right arm was unfortunately broken away, otherwise the statue would be perfect when put together. The pedestal, without doubt, contains an inscription describing the statue and the goddess represented upon it. I was sorely tempted to devote a day to its examination, but, in that case, I should have been compelled to give up visiting some other spots of interest which had never before been investigated, and the hardships and discomforts of these preliminary dashes into the wilds, more especially in the depth of winter, are so great that one is not tempted to prolong them—my present object being rather to know where to go at some future time, when the conditions, political and otherwise, may be more favourable than they are now. I therefore did not linger longer than was absolutely necessary at this place. I had seen enough to prove to me that it would, in all probability, amply repay a fuller investigation, and I determined without delay to push on to a village called Khisfin, which I was extremely anxious to examine, as it has hitherto escaped the careful attention of all former travellers. And yet, from the records which I have been able to examine in regard to it, it must have been a place of considerable importance in mediæval history, though hitherto my efforts to trace it back to an earlier date than the beginning of the tenth century or to identify it with any Biblical site have been in vain. Yakubi, an Arab geographer, who lived about the year 900 A.D., mentions it as one of the chief towns of the province of the Jordan. In his day Syria was divided into three provinces, namely: The province of Damascus, the province of the Jordan, and the province of Palestine. Yakut, in the thirteenth century, mentions it as a town of the Hauran district, below Nawa on the Damascus road, between Nawa and the Jordan. Khisfin was also at one time a fortress of the Saracens, as it is further mentioned as the place to which Al Melek Al Adil, Saladin's son and successor, fled after having been routed at the battle of Beisan by the Crusaders, who advanced upon him from Acre. As it is mentioned as being one of the chief towns of the province, so long ago as 900 A.D., it is probable that its importance dates from a much older period, as indeed was indicated by some of the ornamentation which I found there.

Securing my host, the sheik, as a guide to a locality which promised to be so full of interest, we started at a brisk pace across the plateau, in the teeth of a bitterly cold east wind and driving sleet, and, after riding an hour, came to the ruins of Nab, situated on a small mound. They consist of blocks of basalt building-stone, some traces of foundations, some fragments of columns and capitals, and a tank, dry at the time of my visit, but which evidently held water at some time of the year. It had, apparently, been much deeper at a former period, only the two upper courses of masonry being new visible. It was oval in shape, and measured sixty yards by thirty. This place does not appear to have been previously visited or described. Shortly after leaving it I observed masses of black stone, which, on nearer approach, proved to be the walls of a fortress that, my guide told me, was Khisfin itself. It loomed strikingly up from the grassy plain, and gave rise to pleasing anticipations as I galloped impatiently up to the base of the walls, and, jumping off my horse without even waiting to tether him, in my excitement, scrambled up a breach to see what was inside. I looked down upon a ruin-strewn area, but, alas, no columns, nor capitals, nor signs of Roman remains. This had evidently been in turn a Saracen and a Crusading construction. The outer walls measured sixty-eight yards one way by fifty-four the other. They are nine feet in thickness, and are eight courses of stone in height, the stones being from one foot to one foot six inches square; but some are much larger. Within the fort are the traces of a second or inner wall, forming a sort of keep in the centre; but the whole area was too much encumbered with ruin for any accurate plan to be possible in the limited time at my disposal.

A little beyond the fort stood the village itself. All the intervening and surrounding fields were thickly strewn with the large hewn blocks of black basalt of which the houses of the former population had been constructed, and which, to judge from the area which they covered, quite justified the description of Yakubi, that in his day this was one of the chief towns of the province, and the centre of a very large population. The present squalid inhabitants, few in number, seemed to live in a perfect quarry of these old building-blocks. No difficulty had they in finding material wherewith to build their houses, their large cattle vaults, and enclosing yards. They simply piled the tumbled masses of stone in a little more regular order, one above another, to make walls of any height or thickness they chose, without mortar or cement, and had houses that would last forever. As all the stones were beautifully squared and shaped, they had far more symmetrical walls, thanks to the ancients, than if they had been left to themselves. These black, massive huts all jumbled together with their vaults and yards, without regular streets or lanes, formed one of the strangest looking villages I ever saw. In some cases the walls were formed of stones placed diagonally, in others horizontally, in others perpendicularly. The very roofs were of stone, with earth on the top of them to fill up the cracks. Where hewn stone is so abundant and wood almost impossible to obtain, it is astonishing what uses the former can be put to. And now came a search which I would willingly have protracted over days instead of over minutes, which were all I had to give to it. To “do” Khisfin thoroughly one ought to examine carefully every stone in every house, besides the acres of stones by which the present village is surrounded. As it was, I went into as many houses as I had time for, and made sketches of what ornamentation I found. The natives had evidently used as lintels for their doorways the stones which had served the ancients for the same purpose. These were usually four or even five feet long, and many of them were ornamented with curious devices. They were in part Crusading and in part Saracenic. There were the tablets with half-effaced escutcheons, rosettes, bosses, crosses, and other Crusading emblems, which left no doubt in my mind that this must have been at one time an important Crusading fortress, though in the only book relating to the crusades which I happen to have by me no mention is made of it. There were several of those curious carvings, difficult to describe, which characterize Saracenic architecture as an evidence that the Moslem conquerors of the crusaders had also had a hand in its adornment; but what was more interesting, there were floral wreaths and carved devices which are a feature in Byzantine art, which gave clear evidence that before the conquest of this province from the Byzantine empire in the seventh century it had been an important city of that civilization which immediately succeeded the Roman.

The important question which I could not determine was whether, in the old Roman times, it had been a place of note. There can be little doubt that a future examination, of a more minute character than I was able to give, would determine this point, and it is not at all impossible that upon the old stones might be found seven-branched candlesticks, pots of manna, or emblems of a still older date, which would carry it back to Jewish times. Meanwhile I looked anxiously, but in vain, for an inscription which might throw some light on the subject, and it is certain that amid such a mass of ruin such are to be found. All my inquiries for old coins only tended to alarm the villagers, who looked on my proceedings with their usual suspicion, and associated my visit and my desire for old money with their taxes, which is the only idea that the fellah of Palestine seems able to connect with the visit of a prying and inquisitive stranger. The whole of the country which surrounds Khisfin is susceptible of the highest degree of cultivation; the land is eminently fertile and almost a dead level, capable of producing abundant crops, if there were any people to cultivate it. As it is, it is allowed to run to waste. It affords pasture to their flocks, but these are scanty, through fear of the Arabs, and the people, unable to rely upon the government for protection, and, indeed, being only aware that there is a government through its tax-gatherers, are sullen and suspicious and discouraged, and utterly without energy to do more than provide themselves with the barest necessaries of life.

FURTHER EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY.

Haifa, March 31.—From Khisfin, the ruins of which I described in my last letter, I struck off in a westerly direction under the guidance of the sheik who had been my host the night before, and who, now that he was convinced that I had nothing to do with tax-gathering, and was only possessed by what must have seemed to him an insane desire to find old stones and make pictures of them, took an evident pleasure in ministering to such a harmless form of insanity; in fact he became quite a bore on the subject. As he was naturally unable to appreciate any distinction between one old stone and another, he was constantly making me ride out of my way to look at some weather-beaten piece of basalt which had a fancied resemblance to a wild animal; or to a mound, the ruins on which belonged to a village that had been deserted within the last twenty years. Still I never could afford to treat his assurances with indifference, as there was always the possibility, until I satisfied myself to the contrary, that the stones to which he was guiding me might possess interest; and indeed on one occasion they did, for they turned out to be the ruins of a Roman town, where a few fragments of columns and capitals still remained to bear testimony to the particular civilization to which they belonged, and which, although they did not present any striking architectural features—indeed, the remains were somewhat insignificant—it was always a satisfaction to have been the first to discover. The name of these ruins was Esfera.

Near them a very singular and unpleasant accident occurred to me. I rode my horse to drink at what seemed a muddy puddle, which was about ten or twelve feet in diameter. Instead of being content to drink at the margin, he took two steps into it, and suddenly disappeared head first; that is, his head disappeared, his hind-quarters remained for a moment poised above the water just long enough to enable me to throw myself off backward into about two feet of puddle. We had walked into an overflowed well. When his hind-quarters at last went down into it his head came up, or, at all events, as much of it as was required for breathing and snorting, which he did prodigiously, evidently in a panic of terror, while I stood drenched and shivering on the bank in the cold east wind and sleet, wondering how we were ever to get him out. The poor beast was out of his depth, but the dimensions of the well were too limited to enable him to swim, or even to scramble freely. Fortunately I had sent on my saddlebags by my servant, or the animal would have been hopelessly weighted down. As it was, it was only by the united efforts of the party tugging at the bridle and stirrup-leathers that, after many futile efforts, at the end of each of which he fell back and for a moment disappeared altogether, we ultimately succeeded in extricating him. Meantime my own plight was in the last degree unenviable, the more especially as I was not in very good health at the time, a consideration which induced my companion, with a truly commendable devotion, to take off his nether garments and insist on my wearing them instead of my own, while he performed the remainder of the day's journey in the slight protection which he wore beneath them.

It was in this guise, and while still discussing my strange mishap, that our attention was suddenly arrested by finding ourselves surrounded by what are perhaps the most interesting of antiquarian objects, a number of dolmens. In a very limited area—none of them were over two hundred yards apart—I counted twenty. The subject of these rude stone monuments of a prehistoric age is so interesting that I will venture on a few words in regard to them.

The most remarkable point about Syrian dolmens is, that while they have been found in numbers to the east of the Jordan, not one has been discovered in Judea or Samaria, and only two or three in Galilee; and those are doubtful specimens. Indeed, it is only of late years that they have attracted the notice of explorers east of the Jordan; but since attention has been specially directed to the subject, we have constantly been having new discoveries. Six years ago I found one of the first at a spot not more than twenty miles from the hitherto unknown field I had now come upon. That dolmen stood alone, and being previously unaware of their existence in this part of the world, I examined it with the greatest interest. Since then Captain Conder, during his hurried survey in Moab, has found above seven hundred in that part of the country, and the result has been that the controversy as to the purpose for which they were designed has been reopened with renewed vigor.

The dolmen, which usually consists of three perpendicular stones forming three sides of a small chamber, with a single huge covering slab as its roof, is found in almost every part of the world except America, though I saw a notice in a paper the other day of one having been discovered in Missouri. There are stone monuments in Central America, I believe, somewhat resembling them, but I am not aware that the point has been satisfactorily determined, and it is of the highest interest that it should be, as it would establish the existence of general contact between the universal families of that ancient stock which preceded both the Aryan and Semitic races, and which belonged, therefore, to the illiterate and prehistoric age of the use of bronze and of flint.

Dolmens have been found in almost every country in Europe. They are numerous in the British Isles, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Prussia, and the south of Russia. I have myself found them in the mountains of Circassia, and they exist in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, in great numbers in Algeria and the north coast of Africa, in Asia Minor and India, and we have recently heard of them in Japan! Wherever they exist are generally to be found menhirs, or single monolithic stones, and stone circles, such as Stonehenge in England, or long rows of standing stones, such as those to be found at Carnac in Brittany, or smaller stone circles, such as are common to the east of the Jordan. Those found in Syria are generally placed in a position commanding an extensive view and in close proximity to water. They are either “free standing,” that is, quite alone and isolated, or they are covered by cairns of stones; or they are, as the majority were in this instance, perched upon piles of stones.

It has been hitherto supposed that in all these cases they were sepulchral monuments, but it has been recently suggested that those alone beneath the cairns may have served this purpose, and those which were free standing or on cairns may have been used as altars. The basis for this conjecture consists in the fact that the flat covering stones of the Syrian dolmens are very often provided with cups or hollows, which may have served to hold sacrificial oil; and, moreover, the free standing dolmens are often on smooth rock, so that it would not be possible to inter a body beneath them. I have seen the covering slab to be as large as eleven feet long by five wide, though those in the field I was now examining were much smaller, some of the covering stones not being above five feet by three or four; this was probably owing to their being of basalt, which is much heavier than ordinary stone. Nearly all were trilithons, the covering slab being sometimes held in position by pebbles inserted under it; and in many instances they appeared to have a slight slant which was not the result of accident.

The natives here call them “Jews' burial-grounds,” showing that the local tradition is in favor of their being sepulchral monuments, though it is very certain they date from a period long anterior to the Jews. Indeed, the probability is that the disappearance of these monuments from western Palestine, where they no doubt existed, is due to the command to destroy heathen monuments. Thus, in Deuteronomy, we find again and again repeated injunctions to overthrow the Canaanite altars, and to break or smash their pillars. These exhortations we find carried into practice by Hezekiah and Josiah in Judea, and as the Book of Deuteronomy was held sacred by the ten tribes as well as by the two, we are justified in supposing that they carried out the order in Samaria and Galilee. But the land to the east of the Jordan always contained a mixed population, over which the kings of Israel and Judah exercised but little control. Baal worship was rife in Bashan, Gilead, and Moab in the days of Jeremiah, and the reforming zeal of Hezekiah did not affect the land where Chemosh and Ishtar, Baal, Peor, Nebo, and Meni yet continued to be worshipped. This accounts for dolmens not having been found, except with a few doubtful specimens, in Galilee to the west of the Jordan.

With the exception of the roughly excavated hollows in the covering slab, these rude stone monuments of Syria have, so far as is known, neither ornamentation nor rune nor other mark of the engraver's tool. In comparatively few instances they are made of hewn stone, very roughly cut, but generally they are of natural blocks and slabs entirely unformed. Thus, if there be any comparative scale of antiquity on which we can rely connected with the finish of the monument, the Syrian dolmens may claim to be considered among the oldest of their kind.

The word “dolmen,” usually rendered table-stone, should, according to Max Müller, be more properly translated “holed” stone, implying either a gateway, such as is formed by the trilithon, or else applying to menhirs and dolmens pierced with a hole, as in the case of the Ring stone, the Odin stone, and a peculiar class of holed dolmens. The one I saw in Circassia was of this latter category. Instead of three stones supporting the covering slab, as is almost invariably the case in Syria, there were four, and in the centre of the fourth was a circular hole, about eighteen inches in diameter, or just large enough to allow a thin man to squeeze through. Some have supposed these holes to be connected with some sacrificial rite, others to be due to the superstition that the dead could not rest in peace in tombs without an inlet for air. But the whole subject is encompassed with mystery, and affords material for endless conjecture.

So also do the sacred stone circles, of which I have seen several to the east of the Jordan. They are held in the greatest veneration by the Arabs, who can give no rational explanation of the sacred character they possess, except that they have been sacred from immemorial time. Here, again, these may either have originally had a sepulchral character, or they may have had reference to that peculiar and most ancient worship of which the menhir or monolith was the emblem, for in some instances menhirs are placed in certain fixed positions in regard to the circles, or they may have had an astronomical significance. It is singular that to this day the reverential attitude of the Arab is outside of the circle with his face to the rising sun, while in India the same circles are to be found among the Khonds in connection with the worship of the rising sun, the tallest member of the circle being towards the east.

The conclusions at which we may proximately arrive with reference to these interesting monuments are—according to Captain Conder, to whose researches I am indebted for many of the foregoing remarks—that the menhir is the emblem of the earliest religious idea suggested by the creative potency; that the circle may either have a sacred significance connected therewith, or be a sepulchral enclosure; that the dolmen, when free standing, is more likely to have been an altar than a tomb, but when buried beneath a cairn it may have been sepulchral; that the cairn is not always sepulchral, being sometimes a memorial heap; and that all are relics of a long-buried past.

THE DISCOVERY OF UMM EL-KANATAR.