Palestine

by C. R. Conder

CHAPTER III.
RESEARCHES IN GALILEE.

THE third province of Western Palestine is divided into two regions—Upper and Lower Galilee. Lower Galilee was surveyed in 1872 and 1875. Upper Galilee was completed in 1877 under the direction of my companion, Lieutenant Kitchener, R.E., who joined the party in the autumn of 1875. During this year, when the field party was engaged in Upper Galilee, I was employed in London in charge of the drawing of the map, executed by Ordnance Survey draughtsmen, and writing the Memoirs of the country already surveyed, consisting of five-sixths of the total area. Upper Galilee, however, I visited in 1873, and again in 1882, and have thus had occasion to explore almost every important site within its limits.

The boundaries of Lower Galilee include the great plain of Esdraelon and the Nazareth hills, with the smaller plains to the north and east, which stretch to the mountains of Naphtali. No part of Palestine is fuller of interesting sites, and several important discoveries were here made, including a synagogue in ruins on Mount Carmel, and the probable remains of the city of Megiddo.

Before the survey was made, Megiddo—one of the most important places in Palestine—was supposed to be identical with the Roman city of Legio. The reason which induced Dr. Robinson to make this suggestion seems to have been that Megiddo is several times mentioned in the Old Testament with Taanach, a ruined town near Legio. In other passages, however, Megiddo is noticed with Bethshean and Ibleam, places east of the great plain, so that the argument has no great force. There is only one place in Palestine where a name at all like that of Megiddo exists, namely, at the large ruin of Mujedd’a, a well-watered site at the foot of Mount Gilboa, just where the valley of Jezreel opens into the Jordan plain south-west of Bethshean.

Megiddo appears as an important place very early in history. Thothmes III. here fought a great battle against the allied Canaanites on his way to Damascus, and has left us a catalogue of his spoils, which gives a most vivid picture of Canaanite civilisation. Chariots of silver and gold, precious stones, bronze armour, Phœnician arms, gold and silver currency, statues and tables of precious metal, ivory, and cedar, are mentioned as Canaanite trophies, with wine, incense, corn, sycamore wood, goats and oxen, mulberries, figs, and “green wood of their fair forests,”—perhaps referring to the oaks of Mount Tabor. Such, according to the Egyptian monuments, were the products of Palestine in the sixteenth century B.C., before the Hebrew invasion under Joshua.

About two centuries later, an Egyptian traveller records how he came down from the shores of the Sea of Galilee to the “fords of Jordan” and to the “passage of Megiddo.” In the Bible we find Megiddo to be the place where Josiah awaited Necho, the Egyptian king, then on his way to Carchemish, on the Euphrates. In every case this point appears to have been that where Egyptian invaders fought for the passage of Jordan on their way to Assyria. There is little now to be seen at Mujedd’a beyond a mound such as marks the site of many another famous city, but the spot is one well fitted for a great town, on account of the fine supply of water from the springs below.[41] The site has a further interest, because from Megiddo was named the Har-Mageddon, or “Mountain of Megiddo,” better known as Armageddon (Rev. xvi. 16)—the author of the Apocalypse evidently referring to the old battle-field of Canaan, which is also noticed in the Book of Zechariah (xii. 11), in connection with the mourning of Hadadrimmon.

Above Megiddo on the west are the barren ridges of Gilboa, where Saul fell in battle, and between this and the Carmel range is the V-shaped corn plain of Esdraelon. In the north-east corner of this plain is the volcanic cone of Nebi Dhahy, and beyond this, on the north, the mole-hill form of Tabor. Nebi Dhahy is named from a little white saint-house on its summit, sacred to a Moslem hero, whose bones are said to have been carried hither from the Kishon by his dog. Probably he is to be connected with Dhahya el Kelbi (Dhahya of the Dog), who was converted before the Battle of the Ditch, according to Moslem chronicles. It is curious that sacred dogs occur more than once in Palestine folk-tales, for the dog is an unclean beast to the Moslem, while, on the other hand, to the Persians it was amongst the most sacred of animals. The Tyrian Hercules was accompanied by a dog, and a sculpture which perhaps represents this group is still to be seen on the rocks not far from Tyre.

Mount Tabor is one of the few places in Western Palestine where the oak grows as a forest tree in abundance. There is an oak wood also west of Nazareth, and an open forest of scattered oak trees in the Sharon plain, but east of Jordan it is found in Mount Gilead in greater luxuriance. In the glades of Tabor it is said that the fallow-deer still lingers, but we never came across one of them. On Carmel, on the other hand, the roebuck is still hunted, and this species—the existence of which in Palestine was quite unknown before—we found to bear the name Yahmûr, which occurs in the Bible as the Hebrew word for a species of deer. I afterwards found that the Yahmûr was known to the Arabs east of Jordan, no doubt as a denizen of the oak woods of Mount Gilead.