It was on the morning succeeding the discovery that I went to the spot. The chamber was crowded with people, brought thither by the report which had been circulated the preceding evening in Sayda respecting it. The Turks had already picked out the eyes of one of the most beautiful figures, and otherwise defaced it. Being known in the neighbourhood, my interference had some effect in stopping them from proceeding farther, and I succeeded in convincing such as were then present that the paintings had no Christian symbol, and consequently could not be, as they imagined, any representation of the Holy Supper, or of the Virgin Mary, &c. as they thought them. But party succeeded party, and the task of reasoning with them all was impossible; for, to portraits of the human figure, whether Christian or pagan, the Turks are always enemies. Having no drawing materials, I could only take a hasty sort of outline in ink, which sketch, however, afterwards served me somewhat in the restoration of parts of some of the figures, subsequently destroyed. I again visited the cavern on the following day. Just at this time the plague broke out, and, raging terribly, spread consternation in the village of Abra, and in the town of Sayda. Called away by my medical duties towards others, and by the feeling of self-preservation, which forbade me to risk the danger resulting in pestiferous times from the contact of strange persons, so inevitable in a confined place, the sepulchre was abandoned. I will here anticipate the order of my journal, and relate how I afterwards made copies of these paintings, a rough sketch of which is here given.
The plague ceased in the month of July. I then bethought myself again of the sepulchre, and revisited it. Much injury had been done to the paintings. The only chance which remained of rescuing them from oblivion was the arrival of some traveller in these parts who could draw. This hope was not realized until the year 1816, when, in the month of March, Mr. William Bankes, the late Member of Parliament for Cambridge University, came to Mar Elias; and, having convinced me, by several drawings which he showed me, that he was an excellent draftsman, I conducted him to the sepulchre. This gentleman compared the paintings in it to those at Herculaneum.
During the lapse of a few months, considerable damage had been caused by the alluvion of mould driven in by the rains. The figures nearest the entrance were covered by it up to the shoulders, and the floor was sodden with wet. Mr. Bankes, nevertheless, executed in two days a perspective view of the interior, in colours. But he carried his projects yet farther: for he formed the design of removing some of these fresco-paintings from their places, and, accordingly, employed a mason to cut them out from the piers of the walls; which was effected in two instances.
Soon after this he departed, and, just at the time, a supply of drawing materials reached me from England. In watching the delineations I had seen made by him, I had conceived them to be inadequate to the purpose of giving a complete representation of the sepulchral chamber, more especially as the ceiling had been entirely left out, and some other omissions made, which seemed to me material. I accordingly set diligently to work, and copied them as well as I could.[94]
For the better elucidation of our subject, it will be proper to say a few words on the different kinds of tombs and sepulchres common to the country of which we are now speaking.
The traveller, who visits the Levant, cannot fail to be struck with the numerous excavations which are found near the site of almost every ancient city. These are readily understood from their form to have been sepulchres. They occur in a variety of shapes: some are simple oblong sarcophagi, hewn out of the rock, and only capacious enough to hold one human body; others are spacious grottoes several yards in length and width, in the sides of which recesses or cells were hollowed out as receptacles of the dead; whilst, intermediate to these two, is a multitude of others, the size of which, and the more or less labour bestowed in making them, depended, it may be conjectured, on the means of those who caused them to be excavated.
Through the whole length of the coast of Syria, from Laodicea to Jaffa, we had remarked these sepulchres, and had observed them, likewise, in the interior of the country: as at Heliopolis or Bâlbec, at Malûla, a village on the road from Damascus to Emesa, at Jerusalem, at Damascus, and at other places: but, in every instance, they were open; always in a state of decay, from the effects of time and the weather, and seemed long to have been the haunts of jackalls, or the pens of sheep and goats. In all of them little remained beside the bare rock, out of which they had been chiselled.
A concise description of the various forms observable in these sepulchres may not be unnecessary, as introductory to our particular subject.
The rudest sarcophagi, and such as we may suppose served for the tombs of the common people, were oblong parallelograms (fig. 3), large enough to receive (besides the corpse) a case or coffin enclosing it: these were hewn out on the surface of any convenient rock.[95] Such seem to have been covered with a double pent lid (fig. 1 and 4), which had within a concavity corresponding to the exterior, and in them perhaps were placed terra cotta coffins; a conjecture rendered probable by the discovery made in 1805 of a coffin[96] of this material, found entire in one of these sarcophagi near the city of Sidon.
There was a second sort of sarcophagus (fig. 6), of the same shape, as to the interior, with the first mentioned, and hewn likewise out of the rock; but the rock was chiselled away externally, so as to leave it entirely in relief and insulated.[97] The lids and sides of this sort were plain in some, and in others sculptured into ornaments, mostly consisting of bulls’ heads and festoons of flowers.[98] Of the plain kind several are still remaining on the road from Sayda to Beyrout, near what is called the Guffer or toll-house. This spot has obtained the name of the Jews’ Sepulchres (Kabûr el Yahûd). Numberless fragments of this kind of sarcophagus are to be seen in and near every town in Syria, often of marble, and sculptured in the most finished manner.