M. E. Rey, the French explorer, who has specially studied Crusading castles, points out a difference between those built by the Templars and those built by the Hospitallers, for most of these strongholds belonged to the great military orders, and very few were held by the King. The Templars had eighteen castles in all, including Chateau Pelerin (now Athlit), built in 1291 A.D. south of Carmel, and Tortosa. The Hospitallers in the twelfth century had only five great castles, Margat, Krak des Chevaliers, Chateau Rouge, Gibelin and Beauvoir. The Templar castles contain polygonal chapels, like the Templum Domini or Dome of the Rock, whence the Order was named, while the chapels in castles of the Hospitallers are of the usual form, with nave and aisles. The latter builders also did not generally make a donjon tower as an inner citadel, but often had a double line of ramparts with several important towers, as at Krak des Chevaliers, one of the finest and best preserved of the castles, which I visited in 1881, or that at Banias, which I explored in the following year. Krak quite recalls the Norman castles of our own country, or the early French castles, as it towers above the hamlet on the rugged slope. In its courtyard the whole population of that hamlet might have taken refuge in time of war. The proud humility of the Hospitallers is brought to mind by the text carved in Gothic letters by the door of the chapel in the inner court—
Sit tibi copia
Sit sapientia
Formaque detur
Inquinat omnia
Sola superbia
Si cometetur.
There is, however, another text on the outer wall at Krak in ornamental Arabic characters and in another style. “In the name of God, merciful and gracious, the rebuilding of this most favoured castle was ordered in the reign of our master the Sultan Melek edh Dhaher, the wise, the just, champion of the holy war, the pious, the defender of frontiers, the victorious, the pillar of the land and of the faith, the father of victory, Bibars.” And such indeed was the history of nearly all these castles, which Bibars took, and afterwards restored and held. The name of that famous champion of Islam, Melek edh Dhaher, “the victorious king,” is even now not forgotten by the peasantry of Palestine.
From the mountains of Upper Galilee you look down to the narrow shore-line of the coast of Phœnicia. In the later Jewish times the Holy Land was only reckoned to extend along the shore as far as Ecdippa (ez Zib), north of Acre. From that point it passed over the spurs along a line which I have traced in detail from the names of places mentioned in the Talmud, leaving a broad strip of country reckoned as Phœnician. It is very remarkable that immediately beyond this line we begin to meet with carvings on the rocks representing human beings. One of these near Tyre I copied in 1881, and another which I have not seen is reported to exist near Kanah. It cannot be accidental that no such sculptures have been found within the borders of the Holy Land, whereas they occur in Northern Syria near Merash, and in Assyria and Asia Minor. The explanation is, I believe, to be found in the Hebrew law which forbade the representation of living things.
If any carved idols of the Canaanites existed on the rocks in Palestine, they were probably destroyed at some period or other by the pious Hebrews or Jews. The distinction is, however, one of race, for the Arab hates carved images as much as did the Jew, while the Turanian Canaanites were fond of such arts, just as the Turanians of other parts of Western Asia were the first to adorn temples and houses with sculpture and painting.
The moment we cross the border into Phœnicia, we also find Phœnician inscriptions, though not of very great age. At Umm el Amed, Renan discovered three texts, of which the longest is a dedication to Baal Shemim, “That I may be remembered and my name good beneath the feet of my Lord Baal of the Heavens for ever.” The ruins among which these texts were found include a city (probably the Biblical Hammon) and a temple. Here I found sculptured sarcophagi and altars still lying on the hill side, where the French explorers left them, and the foundations and pillars of a Phœnician temple.
The exploration of Tyre itself was conducted in 1874, in 1877, and in 1881. The famous city is still a fair-sized town, having a few modern houses with tiled roofs. The population is reckoned at about 5000 souls, half at least being Metâwileh or Persian schismatics—some of the most fanatical Moslems in Syria. It was by these new colonists that the town was raised from its ruins in the eighteenth century.
The old Phœnician capital stood on reefs or islands in the sea, which together formed an area of about 200 acres. It had two ports, the Sidonian on the north and the Egyptian on the south, each about twelve acres in extent, or half the area of the port at Sidon. It is a curious fact that until 1881 recent explorers have spoken of the Egyptian harbour as no longer existing. With Lieutenant Mantell’s assistance, I was able to recover the site of this harbour, but the exploration had to be conducted in a novel manner by swimming. There are reefs, which seem to have been regarded as unconnected with any artificial structure, about 200 yards from the rocky shore of the island. On reaching these, we found that the rock had been carefully levelled, and in some places was still covered with remains of cement and concrete. We know that the Phœnicians used concrete at Carthage, and there was probably at one time a wall on this reef, which was thrown down when the harbour, like that of Acre, was filled up with stones, and thus rendered useless. We were able with some little trouble, walking naked in the sun over the sharp rocks, to discover the entrance to the harbour at its west end, and I can only suppose that no one had previously done more than look at the reefs from the shore.