Palestine

by C. R. Conder

As we advance to the eighth century B.C., we find the power of this Mongolic stock decreasing, while that of the Semitic race increases. Among the most interesting discoveries of this period is that of the general diffusion of the worship of Jehovah throughout all Syria and Assyria. As early as 822 B.C. the names of Assyrian officials are compounded with the divine name, and yet earlier, in 887, the name Abijah occurs in Assyria. In the time of Sargon, Yaubidi was king of Hamath, and the names of Joram, king of Edom, Zedekiah, king of Ascalon, Padiah, king of Ekron,[59] tell the same tale as does the name of Joel in a Phœnician text from Malta. The adoration of Jehovah was not peculiar to the Hebrews, nor does the Bible state it to have been. It was common, as early at least as the tenth century B.C., to all the Semitic peoples of Western Asia as far east as Nineveh; for, as Malachi wrote somewhat later, “From the rising of the sun to the going down of the same, My name is great among the Gentiles ... saith Jehovah Sabaoth” (Mal. i. 11).

In spite of such community of religion, the growth of Assyria brought troublous times on Northern Syria.[60] About 854 Assur Nazir Pal defeated the Hittites, and advanced as far as Tyre; but a great battle was fought on the Orontes, in which we find Ahab of Sirlai[61] leagued with the kings of Damascus, Arvad, and Ammon—a force in all of 85,000 men, and this league for a time stopped the Assyrian advance. In the same long reign, however, about 842 B.C., another battle was fought near Hermon, and Damascus was besieged and the Hauran overrun by Assyrian armies. From that time forward the road to Palestine began to be open. Tiglath Pileser II. advanced in 740 to Hamath, and six years later invaded the Land of Israel and marched to Ascalon and Gaza. In 720 Sargon takes Samaria and quells an outbreak in Hamath; and about this time the system of deportation, which was the ordinary Assyrian policy, led to the establishment of North Syrian, Chaldean, and Thamudite Arab colonies in Palestine, and to the captivity of the Ten Tribes. In 717 Carchemish fell to Sargon, and the power of the Hittites was finally overthrown, and six years later the Assyrians were at Ashdod in Philistia. Sennacherib followed in 701, and penetrated even to Petra in 688. Yet the internal troubles of the Assyrian Empire gave a brief respite after his death, when a new foe appeared in the northward march of the Arabs and Nabatheans, who raided through Eastern Palestine and the Hauran into Northern Syria in 650 B.C. With the fall of Assyria a period of peace followed, but a century later we find Nebuchadnezzar on his way to Jerusalem, following the defeated Egyptians from Carchemish.

Of this troublous history the rocks of Syria themselves give evidence. At the mouth of the Dog River, near Beirut, where Rameses II. had erected three bas-reliefs in honour of Ptah, Ra, and Ammon, Tiglath Pileser I.—the hunter already noticed who also conquered the Hittites—left his statue about 1100 B.C., and another Assyrian tablet on this spot is thought to be even older. Four more tablets were added later, between 885 and 681 B.C., by Assur Nazir Pal, by Shalmanezer III., by Sennacherib, and by Esarhaddon, showing that all these conquerors passed by Beirut. Near this group of tablets mutilated inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar have also been found, and quite recently, in 1884, other inscriptions by Nebuchadnezzar have been recovered on the eastern slope of the Lebanon not far from Kadesh.

The Medes swept away the Babylonians, the Persians succeeded the Medes, and the Syrians continued to preserve their own civilisation, as witnessed by the art of Phœnicia, which throve especially in the Persian period. The battle of Issus raised a new power in Asia, and with the successors of Alexander a new capital arose in the valley of the Orontes at Antioch. It is remarkable, considering the power and wealth of these Greek monarchs, that they should have left us no monuments in Syria, as far as is at present known. Their coins are frequently found, and are often of great beauty, being among the earliest on which the head of a king appears portrayed from life. During this age, even as late as 307 B.C., the Greek kings of Cyprus were still using the peculiar script called the Cypriote syllabary, but no trace of its use has yet been discovered in Syria, where the simpler Phœnician alphabet reigned supreme, while on the Greek coins of the Seleucids the kindred Greek characters appear.

Nor are the troublous times of the great struggle which gave Syria to the Romans represented by monuments; but with the Antonines a great architectural period began, when Baalbek was built, as well as many great cities throughout Syria. It has often been supposed that the enormous stones which form part of the outer wall at Baalbek are remains of a Phœnician temple preceding the Roman fane, but the visitor can satisfy himself that these huge blocks—more than sixty feet in length, and unrivalled elsewhere in Syria—stand on Roman masonry; and we have nothing to lead us to suppose that the Phœnicians ever used such enormous masonry. The Baalbek Temple is indeed one of the most certainly-dated buildings in Syria, and the Latin inscription on the east wall, copied by Ward and Dawkins, but now almost illegible, gives the names of Antoninus Pius and Julia Domna, who appear to have founded the huge sanctuary in honour of the “great gods of Heliopolis.”

In the wild mountains of the Anseiriyeh other remains of the same period have been found. Though attributed by popular tradition to Solomon, these buildings, by the details of their architecture, and by the Roman eagle, whose winged form occurs here as well as at both Baalbek and at Rukhleh on Hermon, are to be ascribed to the Roman period, to which also we must refer the curious monument near the source of the Orontes called Kamu’at el Hirmil, on which, in bas-relief, is represented the chase of the stag, the boar, and the bear.

Homs, the ancient Emesa, was the birthplace of Julia Domna, the mother and bride of emperors. This city also had a famous fane—that of the Black Stone, which was transported to Rome. When El Mukaddasi in the tenth century visited the city, he found a remarkable statue still standing in the mosque—“the figure of a man in brass standing on a fish, and the same turns to the four winds.” It was regarded as a talisman against scorpions, and was apparently a kind of weathercock. It was perhaps to this statue that the Greek inscription which I copied in the same mosque originally belonged, the text, when translated, reading thus:—

“Image of the round earth, the king ...
The people having all, with wise mind ...”