The characters of the inscription certify, according to the information of the Consul, Dr. Wetzstein, who has kindly undertaken the copying and translation of the inscription, that they are not of a date previous to 550 of the Mahommedan era, which, therefore, brings us back to the time in which the Greek inscription was made. The passage of the Koran, mentioned already by Burckhardt, is in Surât, xxi., v. 18.
In the same wall, but much higher up, over a far greater door, now bricked up, at a place behind which the kitchen is now lying, another great stone is let in, the ornament of which
might lead to the supposition that there is another old inscription there. Unfortunately, it was impossible to have a ladder brought thither, to examine the stone more carefully. May a later traveller succeed in this!
NOTE E.
([Letter XXXIII.] p. 370.)
The history of the palm-wood of Pharan forms the centre-point of the history of the whole peninsula. The accounts of the Greeks and Romans give a new proof of this, though their geographical determinations have, for the most part, been incorrectly apprehended. Thus the Poseidion of Artemidorus, Diodorus, and Strabo, is generally put at the extremity of the peninsula now called Râs Mahommed, even by Gosselin, Letroune, and Groskura, who had certainly perceived the incorrect gloss of the manuscripts of Strabo (p. 776: τοῦ [Ἐλανίτου] μυχοῦ). As the Poseidion lay within (ἐνδοτέρω) the Gulf of Suez, and as the western coast of the peninsula is described, this altar of Poseidion necessarily lay either at Râs Abu Zelîmeh, the haven of Faran, or at Râs G’ehân, where there was a more southerly and shorter communication by Wadi Dhaghadeh with Wadi Firân. That the Palm-grove (Φοινικών) of that author is not to be found by Tôr, but in the Wadi Firân, has already been rightly seen by Tuch, (Sinait. Inschr., p. 35), although he still places the Poseidion at Râs Mahommed (p. 37). It was the Serb Bâl—the palm-grove of Baal—from which the mountain first obtained its name. It appears that at an earlier date the name of Faran was used with particular reference to the haven near Abu Zelîmeh, and a Pharanitic colony at the place of ancient Elim, in the neighbourhood of the present Gebel Hammân Faraûn, still called Farân by the Arabic historians; while the grove itself was yet called Serb Bâl by the inhabitants. Probably, also, it was here where Aristo landed under Ptolemæus Philadelphus, and founded the Poseidion.
By Artemidorus (in Strabo, p. 776), and Diodorus (III. 42), Mαρανῖται are mentioned, for which Gosselin, Ritter, Tuch, and others, propose to read Φαρανῖται. But as the Maranites lived on the eastern coast of the peninsula, and are reported to have been entirely destroyed by the Garindœans, I can find no support for this conjecture. The gorge Pharan, mentioned by Josephus in Judæa (Bel. Jud. iv. 9, 4), has no connection with anything here.
The name of the Pharanites on the west coast of the peninsula first occurs in Pliny (H. N. xxxvii., 40), for there is no reason to consider the Pharanitis gens, which he places in Arabia Petræa, to be other than the Pharanitai of Ptolemy. That the northern station Phara (circa ten hours west of Aila) on the table of Peutinger, has nothing to do with the Pharanitic palm-grove, has been placed beyond doubt by Ritter, (p. 147 sq.).
Ptolemy, in the third century, is the first who mentions a place called Pharan (κώμη φαράν); yet the grounds and the connection of his calculations so very different from the true relations of the peninsula, had remained obscure, so that the single comparison were useless. His construction of the peninsula is immediately intelligible, if it be considered that he has evidently taken the obtuse coast-angle at Râs Gehân,—whither he put Cape Pharan according to his latitudes, instead of Hammân Farûn,—for the most southern point of the peninsula, whence the more remote coast again runs up to the north-east. By this the peninsula becomes 50´ too short, although the longitude of his promontory agrees with that of the right one. The real point (Râs Mohammed) now answers to the place whither he places the round of the Elanitic Gulf (ἐπιστροφὴ τοῦ Ἐλανίτου κόλπου). The whole Elanitic Gulf (Gulf of Akaba) shrinks with him to a little angle (μυχός) of 15´, as everything is pushed up too much to the north. The coast, from “the term” up to Οννη answers in fact to that from Râs Furtak (Diodorus’s or Artemidorus’s ἀκρωτήριον τῆς ἡπείρου, before which the island of Phoke lay) to Ἀïn Uneh and the Elanitic Gulf, the northern end of which (ἐπιστροφή) he placed at 66° longitude, 29° latitude,[159]