Architectural remains, such as those are which invite the labours of the antiquary at Athens, and at Rome, and at Jerusalem, require to be examined in relation to four distinguishable subjects;—as first—the materials (in a geological sense) that have been employed; and the question to be answered is—Whence have these been drawn—whether from quarries near at hand, or from a remote region? The second of these inquiries relates to the style and quality of the mason’s work—that is to say, we have to note any peculiarity that may belong to the mode of squaring blocks of stone, and of fitting them one to another, and of placing them in layers; or to the manufacture of bricks, if these are in question. The third inquiry is properly architectural, and it has respect to the decorative style of the structure, and its aspect, and its beauty, considered as a work of taste. There then follows the fourth, and it is a most important question—Are these courses of masonry where we now find them—in their original, their primeval position; or have these blocks been dislodged, and overthrown, and scattered, and in some after-time reassembled and made use of by the builders of a later period? This last is often the determinative inquiry, in relation to doubtful points of history; and in the instance just now before us, it has a peculiar significance, inasmuch as there is reason to conjecture that some, at least, of the ponderous masses—the prodigious blocks, whereupon the heterogeneous structures of the modern Jerusalem take their rest—have been dislodged, upheaved, turned about, and again replaced, as at first, more than once or twice in the lapse of ages.
To the first of the above-named questions our answer is easy;—the material of the ancient Jerusalem was drawn from quarries quite near at hand: it is the lime-stone rock of the very site of the city. This has always been supposed; and the fact has lately been more fully ascertained by the explorations of Dr. Barclay,[12] an American physician, and long a resident at Jerusalem. Within the vast caverns that undermine Bezetha, and at a great depth below the surface of the present city, the mother-rock shows, beyond a doubt, what masses have been hewn from it, namely, those large blocks, sixty feet in length, which underlie the Haram wall, and the city wall, in many places, and much of the interior of the city. In those caverns, such as we now find them, these blocks were squared, and their edges bevelled, and their surfaces—the upper and the under, were nicely prepared for their adjustments, according to the methods of a highly refined masonic art. As to this art of the builder, it is such as could have been practised by none but a people well advanced in practical intelligence, and that were in the enjoyment of the opulence and the tranquillity proper to a secure political condition. The mason’s work which is peculiar to, and characteristic of, the cyclopean substructures of the Haram, and the ancient city wall, is of a kind that fixes attention when once it has been seen, and it is such as speaks its remote origin almost as intelligibly as an inscription could do.
The architectural characteristics of Jerusalem, as well of the ancient, as the modern city, cannot but be intelligible to those who are conversant with this branch of antiquarian lore. We easily read the various fortunes of the city, indicated right and left, in-doors and out of doors, scattered upon the surface, and deep in wells, tanks, and caverns, built into walls, and confusedly mixed with the chiselled labours of the workmen of other ages. The one source of ambiguity is that which arises from these disorderly commixtures, when a fragment, a capital, an entablature, which is manifestly Roman, or Byzantine, or Norman, stands so transfixed upon a structure whereupon it is embedded, as to conceal what might indicate the chronology of the earlier work. Nevertheless, amid many such indeterminable questions, there can be no question on the general ground, that, in and among the architectural remains of Jerusalem, we are looking at specimens of the builder’s art, in all the stages, and in all the styles and fashions that have belonged to it, from the most remote times to the latest.
As to the fourth of the above-named heads of inquiry, fall of historic significance as it is, a solution of the problems belonging to it must await a time when this site shall yield itself up, without reserve or restraint, to the industry and intelligence of European antiquarians.
We have need to be reminded of the fact, that, as we become familiar with the books of the Old Testament in childhood, it is not until years later that we learn to correct the wrong chronological conceptions which have arisen from the misadjustment of them as to their order of time. These early erroneous notions continue to haunt the imagination, perhaps through life, and we lose sight of, or quite forget the fact that a period of four or five hundred years intervenes between prophets that take their turn to be read, in the mornings and evenings of a week. Under the misguidance of these chronological errors, we are likely to carry forward, into the era of a people’s maturity, conceptions which belong only to the age of their patriarchal and nomadic simplicity. Some few instructed readers of the Bible may be quite exempt from any such misconceptions; but probably it is many that are subject to them. Moreover, the grave tones of the inspired writers, and their singleness of purpose, so unlike the conventional and sophisticated manner of other writers, favours the idea that the Hebrew nation continued, from age to age, to live on in a condition of pastoral simplicity.
Such was far from being their condition; and a more attentive perusal of the historical books of the Old Testament, and of the prophets, will suggest, and more than merely suggest the belief, that this ancient people had reached a stage of advancement in the arts of life—substantial and decorative—which places them, at the least, on a level with any people that were their neighbours and contemporaries, or of any that are known to us by their records and by their monuments. It is true that we are used to think of Solomon’s temple as a magnificent structure; and yet the descriptions given of it in the Books of Kings and Chronicles, convey an impression rather of its metallic splendour and its richness of decoration, than of the cyclopean style of the masonry that sustained it. Was it, in truth, a great work in an architectural sense? This question admits of a probable answer. The series of prophets, in discharge of their function as the reprovers of national sins, mention and rebuke the sumptuous style and the luxurious manners of those who then were the princes of the people; yet they make no boast, as if they were proud of the wealth, and the arts, and the instructed skill of their countrymen. Nevertheless there occur, in many parts of the prophetic writings, incidental allusions to the splendour of the private structures of the city—houses of hewn stone, houses ceiled with costly woods, decorated with ivory and gold, and fitted up with every device which elaborate luxury might ask for, are spoken of even by some of the earlier prophets. We must believe, therefore, that the Jerusalem of the ancient monarchy was a city of palaces and of princely mansions, in constructing which no cost had been spared.
Here, then, the two portions of an inferential argument come into contact; and it is just at the basement line of the palaces and the mansions of the ancient Jerusalem that they do so. The juncture is of this sort;—we hold in our hand the various literature of an ancient people; this literature has traversed the fields of time in those several modes of conveyance to which, in the preceding pages, we have given attention; it has thus come into our hands safely; it stands attested in modes so many and so sure, that now to speak of it as if it were questionable would be a mere prudery and an affectation. Up and down throughout these writings we find incidental notices of the sumptuous style of the upper classes of the people, in their modes of living, and in the decoration of their public and private buildings; at least it is so as to what were the visible parts of such structures. The kings and the nobles of the Hebrew monarchy were men of great wealth; ample revenues were at their command, and they spent their incomes magnificently. Looking to the documents—the parchment rolls—the volumes of the prophets of those ages, such are the inferences we must derive from them.
But what objects are those that present themselves when, with the pick in hand, we go down to the levels of the ancient Jerusalem? What we there find are courses of highly-wrought masonry, with which, as to the dimensions of the single blocks, and the labour that has been bestowed upon them, nothing can be compared unless it be in Egypt and at Palmyra. The inference is valid, namely, that the people of this city—even those whose structures, sacred and domestic, underlie the monuments of eight or nine successive empires or kingdoms—the primeval people—must have been wealthy, and far advanced in the arts, and large also in their conceptions, and bold in their enterprises. They were a people great and well civilised, and they were so at a time when, as the Greek historian tells us, the ancestors of his nation were petty marauders by sea and land, and were feeding upon acorns!
Such are the conclusions which we arrive at after a careful perusal of the literature of the Hebrew people, if now, at this day—and yet it is in a sense which he did not intend—we listen to the invitation of one of its poets, who challenges us to “Walk about Zion, and to go round about her,” and to “tell the towers thereof, and to mark well her bulwarks, and to consider her palaces;” for in doing so we shall find the means for confirming ourselves in those convictions, the strength of which concerns each of us in the most intimate manner.
THE END.