Palestine, which unites Syria to Egypt, was inhabited by numerous Semitic and Canaanitish tribes which have left us very meagre remains of their art. Like that of the Hittites, this art drew its inspiration both from Assyria and Egypt, though it never did more than imperfectly imitate them. Pharaonic influence is, however, more deeply to be felt here than among the Hittites, since Palestine was nearer to the valley of the Nile. The most important inhabitants of this region were the Jews, and in spite of the poverty of our archæological documents, numerous scholars have, for three centuries, taken a special interest in the works of this people who played so extraordinary a part on the stage of the world. It must be added that almost all these researches have been concentrated upon the exploration of the Temple of Jerusalem and its furniture, which in fact were the highest effort of Jewish art; and though the monuments themselves are no longer in our hands or before our eyes, there is not a single edifice in all oriental or classical antiquity of which we possess written descriptions so circumstantial and so numerous. A hundred restorations of the Temple, taking these as their basis, have been attempted; the least complicated system, and that which has obtained the greatest scientific credit, is that of M. de Vogüé. We will correct and complete it by means of the more recent researches of English explorers. Accordingly, all the art of Palestine being concentrated in the Temple of Jerusalem and its furniture, we shall only speak incidentally of the few other ruins anterior to the Macedonian epoch that have been remarked, whether in Judæa or among other nations of southern Syria, and even among the Nabatæan Arabs.
§ I. The Temple of Jerusalem.
The city of Jerusalem occupies at the present day the southern extremity of a plateau bounded on the east by the Valley of Kedron, and on the west and south by the Valley of Hinnom. This plateau is cut in two from north to south by a ravine called the Tyropœon Valley, so that it forms two hills—one on the east, Mount Moriah, the southern extremity of which, called Ophel, was Sion or the city of David; the other on the west, of much larger extent, to which the name of Sion is improperly given at the present day, and to which the city began to extend only under the kings of Judah. When Solomon ascended the throne, Jerusalem consisted only of Sion or the city of David—that is to say, the narrow hill of Ophel, between the Kedron and Tyropœon valleys. Mount Moriah, on the north, was given up to cultivation, and a rich man of Jerusalem, Araunah, possessed some ground there, with a threshing-floor on which camels and oxen trod out the corn at the time of harvest. David had bought the field of Araunah in order to build upon it the Temple of the true God, and before beginning the construction he had erected an altar on the threshing-floor in order that sacrifice might at once be offered to Jehovah. The materials were collected in great part before the work began; architects, workmen and artists recruited at Tyre, thanks to the assistance of King Hiram, hastened to the spot, and the building began in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign (B.C. 1013).
Fig. 168.—Site of the Temple on Mount Moriah. [78]
The summit of Mount Moriah, the centre of which formed the threshing-floor of Araunah, had to be levelled in order to serve as the site of the structure of the temple. In one place the hollows had to be filled, in another the ridges had to be cut away. The central crest was therefore surrounded by an immense quadrangular rockwork bounded by Cyclopean walls of the height of the truncated summit. These supporting walls, extraordinarily thick, formed of enormous blocks fastened by iron clamps, were also embanked on the outside at the base, and all the empty spaces and interstices between the interior wall and the living rock were filled up with a nucleus of rockwork, so as to form on the upper part a square platform. A F G L is the threshing-floor thus surrounded. At the north-western angle—that is to say, A B C D—it was necessary not to construct a supporting rampart and fill up the declivity of the mount, but, on the contrary, to cut away the natural rock into the form of an angle, so that at this point the enclosure of the temple was bounded by a natural wall rising perpendicularly to the height of 26 ft. A trench dug by the English explorers at the north-eastern angle B L K proved that at this point, on the contrary, the artificial rockwork of the temple basement must have reached the colossal height of 123 feet. On the south, at E F G H, a labyrinth of vaults and corridors, supporting a mass of collected material, was contrived in the substructure, which at the south-eastern angle, at the point G, forms at the present day a terrace 45 ft. high; and yet the accumulated rubbish causes the foot of the wall to be more than 65 ft. below the present surface of the ground! By the system of levelling which we have described an irregular quadrilateral was obtained, the eastern and southern sides of which are 1520 ft. and 1611 ft. long, and the northern and southern side 1017 ft. and 921 ft.
As Mount Moriah extended in a northern direction beyond the temple enclosure, the platform was on this side accessible to all comers. To remedy this inconvenience, and turn the new structure into an isolated citadel as well as a temple, a broad trench was hewn in the rock on the north-east, A B; and on the north-west, B L, a gigantic moat called Birket-Israîl, which at the present day, though filled up to the extent of two-thirds, is still 104 ft. broad and 65 ft. deep. “Thus,” concludes M. de Vogüé, “we have a large quadrilateral excavated on the north, supported on the south by vaulted substructures, and surrounded on three sides by terraces and on the fourth side by a broad moat. Such is the entirely homogeneous whole of the Haram esh-Sherif; such almost it has existed for long centuries, for successive destructions and rebuildings have little altered the primitive plan.”[79] We shall see directly, in the company of the same scholar, that this immense pedestal, the work of Solomon, was only modified and enlarged by Herod on one of its sides.
However, the platform thus prepared was not quite level with the natural crest of rock which crowns Moriah. The culminating point of this rock, called Sakhra, still rose 16 ft. above the terrace. Instead of sapping this peak of chalky limestone and removing it, it was taken as the level of a second platform above the first, but concentric with it and much smaller. This is the upper terrace which at the present day supports the domed building improperly called the Mosque of Omar, which would better be designated by its true name, Kubbet es-Sakhra, “Dome of the Rock.” According to M. de Vogüé, the threshing-floor of Araunah, on which David set up the altar of Jehovah, was a little to the north of the Sakhra, where later the altar of burnt-offerings was placed.