THE SINAI PROBLEM.! 



By Prof. Dr. E. Oberhummer. 



[With 3 plates. 1 



Few unsettled questions in Biblical geography have been so vari- 

 ously answered and aroused such lively discussions as that of the 

 actual site of Mount Sinai. True, tracUtion had seemingly long ago 

 solved tliis problem to its own satisfaction, for since the days of the 

 first Cliiistian anchorites (350 A. D.), whose Hfe in the rock desert. of 

 the Sinaitic peninsula George Ebers depicted in such a vivid manner 

 in his "Homo Sum," the crystalline mountain range which fills out 

 the southern part of the peninsula, forming a section of the Arabic- 

 North African tableland, between the Gulfs of Suez and Als:aba, has 

 been considered as the dweUing place of the Israehtes after the exodus 

 from Egypt. 



Thus the oldest cartograpliic representation which we have of this 

 region, the ''Tabula Teutingeriana," a road map of tlie Roman Em- 

 pire, begins with this viewpoint. The remarkable illustration here 

 presented (pi. 1) unmistakably delineates in outhne, including the 

 two inlets or bays at the end, the Sinaitic peninsula containing a 

 mountain inscribed Mons Syna, above wliich appear the words " Hie 

 legeTYi acceperunt in monte syna'' (here they received the law on 

 Mount Sinai), and farther above we read '' Desertum uhi quadraginta 

 annis erraverunt Jilii Israel ducente Moyse'' (the desert where the 

 cliildren of Israel wandered 40 years, led by Moses). These words 

 obviously do not belong to the original draft of the road map, wliich 

 was based upon Agrippa's map of the Roman Empire in the time of 

 Augustus, but are, hke the words " Mons oliveti," near Jerusalem, a 

 Christian addition of the fourth century.^ But that the localizing of 

 Sinai on the peninsula was then considered estabhshed is shown by 

 the oldest pilgrim literature, such as the Pilgrim of Bordeaux (A. D. 

 333) and the Itinerarium of Silvia.^ 



1 Translated by permission, from Die Sinaifrage. Von Prof. Dr. E. Oberhummer. Mitteilungen der 

 K. K. Geographischcn Gesellschaft in Wien, vol. 54, 1911, Wien, pp. 628-641. 



-A. Elter, Itinerarstudien (Bonn, 1908), p. lOf. 



3 The latter itinerary has been discovered recently in an Italian manuscript and was assigned by the 

 first editors (Gamurrini, Mommsen) to Silvia of Aquitania (about A. D. 390). However, the last researches 

 of R. Meister, Kheinischcs Museum 64 (1909), seem to prove that the author was the Abbess Aetheria of 

 Gaul, in the beginning of the sixth century. The best critical edition of these and the other oldest itin- 

 eraries has been given by P. Geyer, Itinerara Ilierosolymitana. Vieima 1898. A reprint cf "S. Silviae 

 Peregrinatio" has also been made by E. A. Bechtel, Chicago, 1902. 



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