The main antiquity of the place is the great basilica of Constantine, with its thirteenth-century mosaics and wooden roof. Beneath the choir is the traditional site of the “manger,” which has been constantly shown in the same place for nearly eighteen centuries. The church itself is one of the oldest in the world; and Justin Martyr, in the second century, mentions the cave. Origen also says that “there is shown in Bethlehem the cave where He was born, and the manger in the cave” (Against Celsus, I. li.), so that the Bethlehem cave-stable is noticed earlier than any other site connected with New Testament history. It is the only sacred place, as far as I know, which is mentioned before the establishment of Christianity by Constantine, yet it is remarkable that Jerome found it no longer in possession of the Christians. “Bethlehem,” he says, “is now overshadowed by the grove of Tammuz, who is Adonis; and in the cave where Christ wailed as a babe the paramour of Venus now is mourned.”
CHAPTER II.
THE SURVEY OF SAMARIA.
MY first experiences of Palestine survey were from the camp at Nâblus,[35] the ancient Shechem. The method which we then employed was very little varied throughout the whole period of our labours. The camp, consisting of three or four tents, was pitched in some convenient central position by a town or village. Thence we were able to ride eight or ten miles all round, and first visited a few of the highest hill-tops, where, when the observations with the theodolites were complete, we built great cairns of stone. The survey was trigonometrical, depending on two bases, one near Ramleh, east of Jaffa, the other in the plain of Esdraelon, north of Jenin. In 1881 I measured a third base on the Moab plateau, south of Heshbon. All these were connected by triangulation, the stations being from five to fifteen miles apart. The heights of these stations were also fixed by theodolite angles, and thus the elevations above the sea of every great mountain from Dan to Beersheba, and of those east of Jordan between the Jabbok and the Arnon, are known within a limit of four or five feet at least.
The triangles having been calculated in camp, the surveyors separated, and each with his prismatic compass worked in the detail of roads, valley beds, villages, ruins, towers, and all that is usually shown on maps of this scale by Ordnance surveyors. He took the aneroid heights of all important points, which I regard as reliable within ten or twenty feet. He was invariably accompanied by a local guide, who gave the names of the various features shown. The surveyor was never responsible for the spelling of these names. A native scribe was employed to catalogue them in Arabic letters, and thus the errors which might have been caused by the difficulty of distinguishing the sounds of Arab letters were avoided. Without such precaution it would have been impossible to make any scientific comparison with the Hebrew names of the Old Testament.
This work being complete and penned in, we were ready to move the camp. There are parts of the map which I executed to assist my staff, but, as a rule, when the triangulation was complete, I was free to spend much of my time in exploring the important sites within reach, of which I made special surveys on a larger scale.
The explorer is, however, not his own master until he becomes practically acquainted with the language of the natives; and although I had learned French in France and Italian in Italy, the acquisition of a Semitic tongue was only so far rendered easy, that no one who has learned one foreign language grammatically and idiomatically is likely to be content with any other kind of knowledge of other tongues. At the same time, those who have had the advantage of studying foreign languages on the spot know how much easier and more agreeable it is to learn them, as a child learns his mother tongue, first by practice, afterwards by the rules of the grammarian. In the East, the spoken dialects, such as those of Arabic and Turkish, differ greatly from the literary languages. In speaking, simplicity and brevity take the place of the high-flown and artificial refinements of the modern grammarian. The vernacular grammar is simplicity itself compared with the literary style, which only schoolmasters or pedants affect in everyday speech. Nor, indeed, is such indifference to strict grammar unknown even in our own land, though in a less degree, in spoken as compared with written phrase.
At first there was only time to obtain a very superficial smattering, for everyday uses, of the Fellah dialect, which is archaic and rude as compared with the Nahu or “correct” language; but it appeared to me absolutely necessary, not only to understand the Arabic alphabet, but also to become acquainted with the elements at least of grammatical structure; and for this I found leisure during the winters, and the summer holiday of 1873, when a native teacher could be obtained from Damascus. When once the unfamiliar principles of Semitic grammar are understood in one language of the small group (including Hebrew, Arabic, and the Aramean dialects), the student should be able to learn other tongues of the group by the aid of books; but my first lessons in Hebrew I owe to the kind interest of a friend since dead, who devoted time to my education in Jerusalem itself. So unlike in structure are these tongues to either Aryan or Turanian languages, that the idiom is at first hard to catch; and I doubt if any European, until he has lived in the East some time, is ever likely correctly to pronounce the gutturals of the Arabic, unless he is gifted with an ear much more sensitive than usual.
After many years’ study of the native dialect, it appears to me that its further investigation would be of great value to scholars. There can be no doubt that ordinary conversation of the peasantry preserves archaisms of sound, of idiom, and of expression which recall rather the Aramaic spoken in Palestine in the days of Christ than the pure Arabic of southern Arabia. The Syrian dialect (which is much less degraded than Egyptian) is acknowledged, even in dictionaries, to have its peculiarities. The Lebanon servants in my employ were almost unable to understand the speech of the Beni Sakhr Arabs in the Moab desert. The dialect of the towns differs, again, especially in pronunciation, from that of the peasants. The convenient auxiliaries used in daily speech are not recognised in standard grammars, and not a few familiar words of the Fellah dialect I have been unable to discover in the standard dictionaries of Lane and Freytag.[36] The Hebrew goran, “a threshing floor,” and moreg, “a threshing-sledge,” are still words used by the peasants, as is the Assyrian sada, for a “mountain,” and many other ancient words which a good Hebrew scholar will recognise. The peasantry, in short, are not, properly speaking, Arabs, but descendants, in part at least, of the old population to which the Phœnicians belonged, mingled with colonists imported by the Assyrians from Aram, and with the Nabathean and Arab tribes from the south-east. To one acquainted with such a race, the narratives of Genesis and Samuel must always read as though falling from the lips of a modern Syrian, speaking with the same terse vigorous idiom in which his fathers wrote. The Fellahin have been called “modern Canaanites,” and if by this is meant descendants of the Semitic race which the Egyptians found in Palestine before the time of the Hebrew conquest under Joshua—akin to those whose language is represented by the Moabite Stone, and the Phœnician texts from the north coast—the term seems justified by what is known; but, as we shall see a little later, there has always been another population in Syria side by side with the Semitic, of which a few traces are yet discoverable not far north of Shechem.
Ancient Shechem stood very nearly on the same site occupied by the large stone town of Nâblus, in the well-watered gorge, full of gardens of mulberry and walnut, with vineyards and olive-yards and fig trees, above which rise the barren slopes, of Ebal on the north and Gerizim on the south. About one and a half miles to the east, where the vale opens into the small plain of Moreh, is the undisputed site of Jacob’s Well; and north of this, at the foot of Ebal, the little village of Askar, among its cactus hedges, preserves the site of Sychar, mentioned in the fourth Gospel, below which is the tomb of Joseph.
It is curious that Josephus believed Joseph to have been buried at Hebron, for the Book of Joshua places his tomb at Shechem. The monument now shown is an ordinary Syrian tomb in an open-air enclosure by a little ruined mosque. The peculiar feature consists in two pedestals with shallow cups in their tops, placed one at the head, the other at the foot of the grave. I have been told that both Jews and Samaritans offer burnt-offerings at this shrine on these pillar altars, the offerings consisting of shawls, silks, and such fabrics. The same practice is observed by Jews annually at the tomb of the celebrated Simeon Bar Jochai at Meirûn, in Upper Galilee. The substitution of fabrics for animal sacrifices recalls the paper figures which the Chinese burn, representing the various sacrifices, animal or human, which in earlier ages were burned at tombs.