Moslem tombs are everywhere. Most of them are oblong structures of rude but solid masonry erected over shallow graves. In some cases a painted tarbush (fez-cap) marks the head and a little upright stone the feet. A slight hollow is often cut in the flat top for birds to drink from. Tombs are clustered among their iris-flowers beside the walls of villages. They have crept up to the very summit of the hill which Gordon identifies as Calvary. They have encroached on the palace of Herod’s daughter at Samaria. They crowd the ground outside the built-up “Gate Beautiful” at Jerusalem. There is, to our feelings, a certain indecency in this promiscuous invasion of the grave: Mohammedans seem
THE CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY AT BETHLEHEM.
From a garden on the opposite hill.
to bury their dead anywhere. The Crusaders have left fewer memorials of themselves in the shape of tombs than one might have expected. Barbarossa’s tomb we have already visited. For the rest, their memorials are mostly those great buildings whose ruins stand to this day. Early Christianity, too, has left its tombs—catacombs and single graves, especially in the southern part of the coast, and eastwards in Hauran. People of importance have sometimes more than one tomb, like St. George, who is buried both in Lydda and Damascus. But the graves of humbler Christians are more precious than these, for their inscriptions remain, breathing forth the faith and peace with which Christ had blessed the world. Such memorials of victory over death are inextinguishable lamps hung in the sepulchres of Syria. And these lamps are kindled at the Great Light. Never was symbolism more appropriate than that of the Holy Fire in the Church of the Sepulchre. The very heart and soul of Syria is a tomb—the reputed grave of Jesus Christ. To this day the chief pilgrim song repeats with exultant reiteration the words, “This is the tomb of Christ.” It is a song which has never been silent in the land. In the Crusader camps a herald closed the day with the loud cry, “Lord, succour the Holy Sepulchre”; and the sentinels passed the word from post to post, “Remember the Holy Sepulchre.”
It is not, however, the victory over death that impresses one as the spirit of Syria. It is death itself, unconquered, mysterious, and dark. Its Christian tombs are few and far between compared with the countless multitude of sepulchres where there is no lamp alight. Most common and most impressive of these are the Roman and Greek graves. The sands of Tyre and Sidon are strewn with sarcophagi. Here a man’s magnificently carved stone coffin serves for a drinking-trough, there a little child’s stands alone and desolate near a river mouth. In Sidon the ancient cemetery is on a scale whose rifled grandeur speaks volumes concerning the vanity of earthly greatness. At Gadara, the eastward road is a miniature Appian Way: hollow to the tread of horses as they cross the excavated rock, and adorned with sarcophagi carved with crowns and garlands, but bearing inscriptions without hope in them. Farther north, on the eastern slopes of Hermon, we found a far older monument near one of the Druse villages. We were crossing a little brook, when we noticed that the bridge consisted of two huge monolithic slabs of limestone, which, on examination, appeared to be the lids of ancient sarcophagi. The carving on the ends was obviously intended to represent figures of cherubim or some such winged creatures. The heads were gone, but the plumage of the wings was very perfectly preserved. No one in the locality knew anything about their origin. Their general appearance seemed to connect them with the far East.
The Jewish tombs are those which impress the imagination most with the bitterness of death in Syria. They are so sad, with their antique solemnity—so severely simple and unadorned. Where there is carving it is almost always of Roman or Christian workmanship. A few stones with such symbols as the seven-branched candlestick engraved on them are the only unquestionable remains of ornamental Jewish work. Few of the Jewish sepulchres have escaped appropriation by Gentiles. The more famous of them have been appropriated by the Mohammedans, and early Christian tradition is responsible for many other indentifications. The saints and heroes of Israel, claimed also by Mohammedans and Christians, have achieved a kind of funereal immortality which makes the whole land seem one vast graveyard. Every prospect is dotted with tombs. The tomb of Jonas shines white from its hill-top north of Hebron, that of Samuel north of Jerusalem, while Joseph’s tomb commands the view where the Vale of Shechem opens on the wider valley of Makhnah. None of them, however, is at all so impressive as the tomb of Rachel, where a modern house and dome cover a rough block of stone worn smooth with the kisses of centuries of Jewish women. The wailing, as we saw it there, is a memorable custom. The women were mostly elderly or aged, but they were weeping real tears and wailing bitterly as they kissed the stone. It is an old story that consecrates that rough stone, but how eternal is its human pathos: “And they journeyed from Bethel; and there was but a little way to come to Ephrath: and Rachel travailed, and she had hard labour.... And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem.”[37]
The earlier fashion of Jewish work seems to have been the “pigeon-hole,” in which the corpse was thrust into a little tunnel six feet long driven at right angles to the rock face. Later, troughs were excavated to fit the body along the line of the rock. In some instances these graves, especially the former kind, are found in detached groups in wayside rocks, whose perpendicular faces front the open air. For the most part they are grouped in larger numbers within natural caves or subterranean excavations, whose low doorway is blocked by a large circular stone running in a groove. A later example of such a cave is that which is shewn as the “new tomb” of Joseph of Arimathea, close to Gordon’s Calvary. A few specimens of another sort, built of masonry without cement, are to be found in Galilee.[38] Nothing could be gloomier than the constantly repeated ruins of ancient Jewish graves in Syria. No day’s journey is without them. They meet you casually, as it were, at every turning. They are not, indeed, quite dark like the pagan tombs; but the twilight, in which the hope of immortality just broke the darkness for ancient Israel, is grey and cheerless, and the contribution of Jewish graves to the spirit of Syria is a very sombre one.