(8.) Dean Stanley's Sermon on the Exploration of Palestine.
(9—15.) Quarterly Statements I. to VII., April, 1869, to October, 1870.
(16.) The Recovery of Jerusalem. Edited by the Honorary Officers of the Palestine Exploration Fund. With Fifty Illustrations. Richard Bentley.
The Palestine Exploration Society was established in 1865, for the accurate and systematic investigation of the archeology, topography, geology, physical geography, and manners and customs of the Holy Land, for Biblical illustration. The universality of interest belonging to Palestine, and the inefficiency of individual efforts at exploration, made the step advisable; while the success of the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem in 1864 at once suggested the scheme and gave encouragement to its promoters. In the original prospectus of the Society it was proposed to excavate at Jerusalem for the purpose of ascertaining the extent of the Temple enclosure, the position of the tombs of the kings, the site of the Tower of Antonia, &c; to examine other important sites, such as Gerizim, Samaria, Jiljilieh (probably Gilgal) and the mounds at Jericho; to collect materials for a work on manners and customs comparable to Mr. Lane's 'Modern Egyptians;' to effect an accurate survey of the Holy Land; to determine levels and sites and the course of ancient roads; to investigate the geology of the country, especially in the Valley of Jordan and basin of the Dead Sea; and lastly, to apply the same energy and ability to the study of the botany, zoology, and meteorology of Palestine, which naturalists have given to those of the forests of South America and the rivers of Africa. The time is come when we may ask how much of this programme has been carried out, and what amount of light, if any, is being thrown on the Scriptural history. Three years ago, we touched upon the subject;[10] but the Society was then in its infancy, its work only just begun, and the publication of results confined to one or two small pamphlets. We now have at least enough reports to make a thick octavo volume, and these so packed with technical details that they will have to be spread out into three volumes more before their information can be grasped by the ordinary reader. We have, moreover, now before us the book called the 'Recovery of Jerusalem,' which is partly such an expansion and partly a comment on the work, with a trifle of new material.
The active work of the Society commenced in December, 1865, when Captain Wilson, E.E., and Lieutenant Anderson, E.E., with Corporal Phillips, as photographer, landed at Beyrout, to probe the country from north to south. Captain Wilson was the intelligent officer who had surveyed Jerusalem the previous year, and given us a map of that city, as accurate and reliable in every particular as any map to be had to-day of the city of London. This first expedition, in the course of six months, traversed Palestine from Damascus to Hebron, constructing a series of maps of the entire backbone of the country, excavating at Tel Salhiyeh (near Damascus), at Kedes (Kadesh Naphtali), and Mount Gerizim; examining remains of ancient synagogues, copying old inscriptions, collecting materials for about fifty plans, with detailed drawings of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, and tombs, and tracing the ancient system of irrigation of the Plain of Gennesareth. The report of this tentative expedition was in favour of Jerusalem as the headquarters of any future exploring party, since that city promised to prove the greatest mine of discoveries, and to yield the quickest results. Accordingly, in November, 1866, we find Lieutenant Warren, R.E., at work in Palestine, at first with only Sergeant Birtles for his assistant, but afterwards with several corporals as well, and with permission to engage a number of native labourers, according to the amount of excavation going on. Lieutenant Warren spent two months in survey-work east and west of Jordan, and then concentrated his energies on Jerusalem, where he laboured at shafts and galleries almost incessantly, till he was invalided home, in May of the year 1870.
Although the operations at Jerusalem, besides being the more extensive, are also the more interesting in character, it may be well to look, first, at the results of Captain Wilson's expedition, and in connection with that officer's work, to consider the later labours of Warren, where they are of the same kind. First, with regard to the survey-work: it is marvellous that we have never yet had a decently correct map of the land in which all Christians are so much interested. The Admiralty have given us correct charts of the coast-line, but in the interior of the country hundreds of sites remain to be verified, and hundreds to be discovered; while the east of Jordan is almost a terra incognita, and the maps of it scarcely more than creations of the fancy. It is as though in England we were acquainted with but the line of the Great Northern Railway and the towns within a little distance of it on either side, and in Wales knew only the position of three or four of the principal towns. The Wilson exploring party fixed for the first time the exact latitude and longitude of nearly seventy places between Damascus and Jerusalem, determined many sites, ascertained heights, and recorded the features of the ground along which they passed. Lieutenant Warren has obtained the latitude and longitude of many scores of places, fixed the height of some hundreds, and surveyed so much ground that the committee are able to announce the map of Palestine, on the scale of one inch to the mile, as 'now approaching completion.' Much of this work was done in the dangerous country east of Jordan, where life is not safe without an escort, and the sheikh who bargains to protect you is ready to sell you to the next chieftain who thinks your friends can pay a ransom.
Connected with the surveying is the settlement of topographical questions. We have seen an old book which professed to give the latitude and longitude of every place visited by the Scriptural kings, prophets and apostles, with their relative positions and distances from one another in miles. Such information, if reliable, would be of great value, for there is so close a connection between history and geography that in some cases the first cannot be understood without a knowledge of the second; and in most cases the geographical or topographical knowledge will at least assist us to realise the history.
In this department our knowledge is still scanty, though good service has been rendered by the explorers. The site of Capernaum, which has been fixed in three different places by Egmont, Robinson, and De Saulcy, and which Dean Stanley regarded as utterly lost, has been fixed by Wilson with very small chance of error, where Sœwulf placed it in the beginning of the twelfth century, viz., at Tel Hum,[11] on the north-western corner of the lake. The determining circumstance was the discovery of the irrigation of the plain of Gennesareth, as described by Josephus,[12] and its connection with the Tabighah Fountain, whereas attention had previously been fixed on the Round Fountain. It is confirmatory of Wilson's view, that while at the Round Fountain there are no ruins, except some small foundations which may have been anything, Tel Hum possesses extensive ruins, including those of a synagogue. Two miles north of Tel Hum—at Kerazeh, a spot indicated by the Rev. G. Williams, in 1842, and indeed by Pococke, as early as 1740—Lieutenant Anderson identified Chorazin, by the presence of extensive remains, including those of a synagogue. Of no less interest is the discovery of the scene of the destruction of the herd of swine. Lord Lindsay, Mr. Elliott, and others had been on the eastern shores of the lake, but their accounts were mutually contradictory; and Dean Stanley, after rewriting his note on the place again and again, had been obliged to scratch it out altogether. It now appears that there is only one place—namely, Khersa, about half way between Wady Fîk and Wady Semakh—which fulfils all the conditions required by the Biblical narrative. The hills which everywhere else on the eastern side receded from a half to three-quarters of a mile from the water's edge, here approach within forty feet of it; not, indeed, terminating abruptly, but presenting a steep, even slope. The 'Dictionary of the Bible' places the scene at Gadara, now Um Keis, a place from which the swine would have had a hard gallop of two hours before reaching the lake.
We have also in these publications an admirable paper by Captain Wilson, 'On the site of Ai and the position of the Altar which Abram built between Bethel and Ai;' and another by the Rev. Dr. Zeller, Protestant clergyman at Nazareth, on 'Kefr Kenna.' As the old Hebrew names of places commonly cling to the spot under some Arabic disguise—the hill of Dan, for instance, being now Tel el-Kadi (both Kadi in Arabic, and Dan in Hebrew, being equivalent to 'judge' in English)—it is doing good service to collect Arabic names. Great care, however, is needed in this work, for the same wady may have different names in different parts; two or three hills, a fountain, and several ruins may all have one name—that of the district; and the traveller may misunderstand the Arabic answers to his questions. Mr. Layard tells a story of a traveller, who published, for the benefit of those who might follow in his footsteps, a little vocabulary, but whose own ignorance of the language is shown by the fact that several places on his map are marked with the word Mabarafsh. The fact was, that when the traveller asked his guide the name of a place the man answered Mabarafsh—'I don't know,' and down went this name on the map. In the same traveller's vocabulary 'nose' is put down as snuff; for when he wanted the word for nose he had probably raised his hand, and the Arab supposed he wanted 'snuff.' Under these circumstances, it must have been very satisfactory to Lieutenant Warren, after making a list of 150 places visited or seen on the east of Jordan, to find that wherever Robinson had been before him there was substantial agreement in the spelling. Lieutenant Warren and Dr. Chaplin, of Jerusalem, also obtained many names in the course of a tour from Jisr Damieh to Jisr Mejamia and back; and the former has given us a list of thirty-four Tels in the Jordan valley. More work of the same kind will have to be done, as there is much confusion in the spelling of names; besides which there exist many unnamed cities and ruins on both sides of the Jordan. South of Ammân (the ancient Rabbath-Amman, and afterwards Philadelphia, 2 Sam. xi. and xii.), Lieutenant Warren came upon a piece of elevated country, about four miles square, literally covered with ruins of temples and houses.
The synagogue at Capernaum was only one out of nine synagogues examined in the district north of the Sea of Galilee, and the investigation was so thorough that the plan of the building was made out, and careful drawings made and measurements taken. The result has been to dissipate the idea that the synagogues were barn-like structures, and to prove that they had considerable architectural pretensions.