From Dan to Beersheba / A Description of the Wonderful Land, with Maps and Engravings and a Prologue by the Author Containing the Latest Explorations and Discoveries

by John Philip Newman

Usually a chamber was excavated in the living rock below the surface, in the sides of which receptacles were prepared large enough to receive a human form, and arranged in tiers with much regularity; when these were occupied, a door was cut in the perpendicular rock, and other chambers were adjoined either on the sides, in the rear, or below.

Selected alike for its seclusion and its rocky sides, the Valley of Jehoshaphat is a vast cemetery. At its head are located the “Tombs of the Judges.” Though their origin is involved in mystery, they are generally supposed to have contained the remains of the members of the Jewish Sanhedrim, and the supposition is confirmed by the seventy niches within them, coinciding with the number of members composing that venerable tribunal.Excavated in the side of a low rock, the entrance is reached by a descending path. The exterior is tastefully ornamented with a pediment resting on plain but handsome mouldings, adorned with tracery of leaves and flowers, and with a blazing torch in the centre and one at either end. Over the façade a few olives bend down their branches droopingly, and before it are the accumulated mounds of many centuries. Descending into the vestibule, which is thirteen feet long and nine wide, we passed through a richly moulded doorway into an ante-chamber eight feet high, twenty long, and nineteen wide. On the sides of the vault are thirteen loculi, or receptacles for the dead. In the southern wall a door opens to another chamber eight feet square, having in its sides nine arched recesses. In the east wall a second door leads to a similar vault, from which a flight of steps descends to chambers below. Silence and darkness now reign supreme in these mansions of the dead, and of all that was once human not a bone remains.

TOMBS OF THE JUDGES.

Less than two miles to the northeast are the “Tombs of el-Messahney,” discovered by our distinguished countryman of Joppa.[135] Around them are the remains of what was once a large town, such as hewn stones and broken columns. The rock in front of the tomb has been beveled in imitation of Jewish masonry. Formerly an imposing entablature surmounted an open porch, but only a portion of it remains. The entrance is through a large doorway spanned by a round arch, and the spacious chamber within differs from all others in Palestine by having a window. Of the seventeen recesses which enter the wall endwise, there is one nobler than the rest and twice as large. Here, no doubt, the lifeless form of some distinguished person lay in state, under the light of the window, till his successor in office became his successor to the tomb.

Half a mile to the north from the Damascus Gate, and sixty yards to the right of the Nablous road, are the “Tombs of the Kings.” In the western side of a sunken court hewn in the rock, twenty feet deep and ninety square, is a grand portico fifteen feet high, thirty-nine wide, and seventeen deep. Formerly this portal was decorated with two columns and as many pilasters, which, however, are now gone, except a fragment of one of the capitals depending from the architrave. Over the entrance was a heavy cornice and frieze, adorned with clustersof grapes and wreaths of flowers, alternating over a continuous garland of fruit and foliage, extending down the sides to the ground. But time and plunderers have defaced this elegant façade, leaving it a wreck of former grandeur. A solitary palm now rears its graceful form near the spot, and ferns grow out of the cracked face and sides of the portal, covering the broken entablature.

TOMBS OF THE KINGS.

Entering the portico and turning to the right, we found the entrance to the sepulchre to be at once peculiar and complicated. Judging from what remains, the doorway was excavated below the floor of the vestibule, and was approached by a covered passage-way tunneled through the solid rock. At the commencement of this subterranean way there was a trap-door which was secretly covered with a slab. To secure greater safety against those who would sacrilegiously disturb the repose of the dead, there was beneath this trap-door a deep pitso located that none save the initiated, and they only with the greatest caution, could land upon its brink as they stepped upon it. The door of the tomb in turn was guarded with the utmost secrecy. It consisted of a heavy circular slab which was made to run in a groove. The groove inclined upward, and the slab could only be turned by means of a lever. To add to the difficulty of turning the door, both the groove and the slab were nearly concealed by the side of the passage-way, and to the left of the end of the passage-way there was a smaller slab sliding in another groove, which, running at right angles with the former, served as a bolt, and, when pushed in, was received into an aperture cut in the stone door, not only rendering the door immovable, but defying all effort to open it except by the initiated. Though to all appearance these precautions were sufficient to protect this mansion of the dead from the hand of the despoiler, yet, to render the repose of the departed doubly sure, there was an inner door of great weight, so arranged as to fit exactly in the deeply-recessed doorway, and so hung on pivots that it yielded to the slightest pressure from without, while it immediately fell back to its place as soon as the pressure was withdrawn, sealing the doom of the unfortunate one who had entered, as it fitted so exactly in its place that it was impossible to open it again from the inside. The peculiar construction of the door and its rolling in a groove explains the anxious inquiry of the Marys, “Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?”

Creeping through the low entrance, we lit our candles, and found the interior to consist of five chambers, connected by narrow aisles, and in the sides of the chambers are arched recesses for the dead. The largest of these chambers is nineteen feet square. Its walls are of solid rock, hewn smooth. On its south side are two low doorways which lead to as many chambers, and on the north side a third doorway opens to another vault, which is strewn with fragments of elegantly sculptured marble. Here was found that magnificent lid of a sarcophagus which is at present in the Louvre in Paris, where it bears the name of “David’s Tomb.” Beneath these vaults are two others, reached by an inclined plane and a flight of stone steps. Being more concealed than the rest, and containing the most elegant sarcophagi, they were designed, no doubt, for the final repose of the most distinguished persons. But, despite suchextraordinary precautions, these tombs have been plundered, the dust of the dead scattered, the sarcophagi broken, and the treasures they contained extracted.