[See the diagrams of flint implements, [Illustrations II]; pottery, [XII]; alphabets, [XIV] & [XV].]
I. General Principles.
1. Study of the pottery of the country, not merely from books but from actual specimens, is an absolutely essential preliminary. Without an acquaintance with this branch of Palestinian archaeology, so thorough that any sherd presenting the least character can be immediately assigned to its proper period, no field research of any value can be carried out. (See further V below.)
2. A knowledge of the various Semitic alphabets is necessary for copying inscriptions. Unless the traveller be also acquainted with the languages he had better be cautious about copying Semitic inscriptions; without such knowledge he runs the risk of confusing different Semitic letters, which often closely resemble one another. He should, however, be able to make squeezes and photographs.
The following are the languages and scripts which may be found in Palestinian Epigraphy.
| Egyptian, in Hieroglyphics. | Greek |
| Babylonian Cuneiform. | Latin. |
| Assyrian Cuneiform. | Arabic, in Cufic script |
| Hebrew, in ancient script. | Arabic, in modern script. |
| Hebrew, in squarecharacter. | Armenian (in mosaic pavements, also graffiti in Church of Holy Sepulchre). |
| Phoenician. | |
| Moabite. | |
| Aramaic. |
Tables of the chief alphabetic and numeral forms of the West Semitic scripts are given in [Illustrations X] & [XI]; for the Greek, see [Illustration IV].
3. The traveller should have had practice in making measured drawings
of buildings.
4. For some branches of work a good knowledge of Arabic is
indispensable—not the miserable pidgin jargon usually spoken by Europeans, nor yet the highly complex literary language, which is unintelligible to the ordinary native, but the colloquial of the country, spoken grammatically and properly pronounced. Work done through dragomans is never entirely satisfactory, because it requires the unattainable condition that the dragoman should be as much a scientific student of anthropology and of archaeology as the traveller himself.
5. The student for whom these pages are written should not attempt any excavation, unless he has been trained under a practical excavator, and has learnt how work, which is essentially and inevitably destructive of evidence, can be made to yield profitable fruit. There is plenty of work that can be done on the surface of the ground without excavation.