Our road was, for the most part, just such as one finds in the neighbourhood of an English agricultural village—a well-trodden path between cultivated lands—where, however, among corn already springing green, crocuses, white, yellow, and purple, pink cranes' bills, and yellow daisies, the weeds of Galilee, turned the whole into the aspect of a garden. Plovers wheeled overhead, rooks followed the ploughs, dainty chats watched us but a few feet away, chiff-chaffs and corn-crakes and starlings and sparrows and skylarks talked English, and only when we passed a sacred tree hung with rags, or the eye was caught by the colocynth fruit, or by anemones, scarlet, purple, or white, were we reminded that this was Galilee and December, but that, being some two hundred and fifty feet below sea-level, we had no right to feel surprised at hot sunshine and the flora of spring.
The plain widens as we advance, and as here and there some distant spot is pointed out upon the wide horizon, our hearts thrill at the mention of names of lifelong familiarity, glorious in association of the past, but which we realise with difficulty as being before us here and now. Behind us are the hills of Samaria, to our left the country slopes gradually upward into the low hill of Belad-er-Ruah (the Breezyland), the wall which separates the plains of Esdraelon and Sharon, hiding the Mediterranean, and ending, far ahead, in the great precipice of Carmel, where we know the blue waters are lapping gently this soft, warm morning. To our right are the hills of Gilboa; while farther, where peninsulas of mountain step out into the plain, we are bidden to look here and there; while the name of Nain, Endor, and, above all, Nazareth, bring before our minds pictures imagined in childhood, and which it may be difficult, though not unwelcome, to supplant. The great round island of Mount Tabor serves as centre from which to calculate the whereabouts of this place and that.
Our party had been reinforced by the addition of a practical excavator whose presence was specially valuable to us, not only for his knowledge of the country, but because he had done active work on both of the Tells we were about to visit. We commonly called him "the Italian," although he spoke Italian, German, French, and Arabic with equal facility, and, having been associated with the abandoned English railway, was even capable, at need, of falling back upon English.
At the end of two and a quarter hours we drew up at the foot of Tell Taanak. No one who has even seen a Tell could fail to recognise another wherever he met it, and no one who has not seen one would be quite easily convinced of its nature. In Europe, where, if we destroy a house, we use the material for something else, where we reckon in centuries where the East reckons in cycles, where smoke and damp and frost, to say nothing of utilitarianism, are for ever laying waste, it is difficult to conceive of a city abandoned thousands of years ago, and buried, by the hand of Time, as gently as the Babes in the Wood by the robin-redbreast. Imagine the city of York (to take as an example one which stands upon a plain) forsaken of its inhabitants, gently dropping to pieces as it stands, and, finally, neatly covered up, in the course of ages, in a grave-shaped mound, leaving plenty of room for the cathedral towers, and grown over with flowers and grass; then suppose that a party of New Zealanders, visitors to Harrogate, about the fortieth century, should make a vertical shaft straight through the middle, and, somewhat disdainful of vestiges so modern as the county capital, should work their way down to Eboracum, and (but here the analogy of the English town ceases) to two or three cities below that. The specialty of the methods of the German excavators is that specimens of all that is met with are, if by any means possible, preserved as the investigation proceeds, so that you may reconstruct for yourself the life of York, as well as of Eboracum, and of any Scandinavian or British predecessors below both.
The contrary method, of destroying one city to arrive at another, and hastily covering up what remains of both, has however, certain advantages, as it enables excavators to dogmatise without possibility of contradiction from succeeding archæologists, and so saves much of that discussion which, while it establishes knowledge and elicits facts, is a weariness to the amateur public of subscribers and contributors. The German (and, of course, Austrian) excavations are conducted by groups of savants, and not by individuals. Each has his own specialty; and as there are several of such groups now at work in Palestine each, at need, can be reinforced from elsewhere; results can be considered from various standpoints, and opinions exchanged. No ad interim reports are presented to the public; the excavators are not obliged to have something to say at stated intervals; and when the results finally appear they are in a form which leaves nothing to be desired from the point of view of art production. Teutonic thoroughness frugality, and self-dedication can never be more admirably exhibited than in the prosecution of knowledge in this form; and the German expenditure, as compared with the result, is, in Palestine, as surprising in scientific research, as in their philanthropic institutions.
We rode as far as a terrace more than half way up, and then dismounting were soon absorbed in the excavation, on our own account, of a rubbish heap close by, where we filled our pockets with fragments of painted pottery and iridescent glass, with jar handles and broken lamps. "That is Cypriote," "that Phœnician," "that pre-Amoritic," "that merely Arabic," pronounced our experts. "Merely Arabic" might be earlier than the foundation of Westminster Abbey, or the days of Charlemagne, but we were willing to hold it cheap when we could have for the stooping, let us say, the fragment of a water-bottle, still fresh as to its ornamentation, pleasing as to its colouring, which had long been buried when the nomadic tribes of the Israelites first settled in Canaan; or a lamp which may have burned when "fought the kings of Canaan in Taanak by the waters of Megiddo"—celebrated in the savage war-song of Deborah the prophetess, which, in its geographical allusions, is a mine of wealth to the archæologist.
Exploring a Tell must be wonderfully exciting work, even when one has rewards less immediate than the results at Taanak, which is the first Canaanite site ever excavated. Think of finding oneself face to face with the remains of the infants offered up on yonder rock-cut altar—jars and jars full of the bones of poor little Canaanitish babies who might otherwise have lived to play with the little Manassehites who came to settle among them, whose fathers could not drive out the people of Taanak from their own stronghold. Or imagine the sensation of finding, two metres deep under the soil, the only Israelitish altar of incense ever discovered! Although broken into forty pieces, Dr Sellin contrived to put it together, when it was found to be exactly in accordance with the prescribed Mosaic measurements, decorated with rams' horns, with carvings of six cherubs and four lions, and with representations of the Tree of Life and the struggle of a man with the serpent. Dr Sellin ascribes it to the period when the Samaritan influence was strong in Israelitish worship, and thinks it may be as late as from five hundred to one hundred years before Christ. It is to be observed, however, that the German specialists hesitate to claim the very remote periods assigned by other excavators to similar discoveries, often differing from them by as much as a thousand years.
Here we came across the massive wall of a Canaanitish building of a period some eighteen hundred years before Christ; there what was possibly the house of Baana, the governor of the fortress in the time of Solomon; here an Arabian castle of the times of Haroun-er-Raschid; here was found an image of Baal, there of Astarte, here a head of Jahwe, the god of whom it was forbidden to make any graven image. The variety of the commercial relations of Taanak is shown by Mykenæan pottery from the Ægean, scarabs from Egypt, seal cylinders from Babylon. Four thousand years at least passed in review before us as we clambered among the ruins; we ran down an inclined plane into a city which was ancient when the child Joseph passed under its walls, a trembling little slave, on his way down from Dothan into Egypt; or, perching on a staircase, looked into the homes of those citizens whom Joshua failed to subdue. Here we mount a few steps, and find ourselves in the fortress which guarded the plain when Israel and Sisera were struggling on the banks of the Kishon; or, wandering outside, we rest beneath the city walls
"Graven with emblems of the time,
In honour of the golden prime