N0.2111. MEDEBA MOSAIC MAP OF PALESTINE — CASANO WIt'Z. 301 



ruins of several churches, remains of a colonnaded street, inscriptions, 

 and mosaic pavements. The character of some of the ruins show 

 that part of the town had pretensions to elegance. The most inter- 

 esting and noteworthy discovery, both from an archeological and 

 artistic standpoint, was that of the mosaic map of Palestine and of 

 part of Egypt. 



DISCOVERY AND CONDITION OF THE MOSAIC MAP. 



The first notice of the map came through a monk belonging to the 

 Christian colony settled at Medeba, the find having been uncovered 

 in cleanmg the ground for a new church on the lines of an old one. 

 In 1882 this monk wrote concerning the mosaic to Nicodemus the 

 Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem, who simply laid the letter aside without 

 paying any attention to the subject. His successor, the Patriarch 

 Gerasimus, found the letter and sent a master mason (with the 

 pretentious title of architect) to examine the mosaic with du-ections 

 to include it in the new church if found worth whHe. The ' ' architect 

 did not find it worth while. And thus in the building of the new 

 church large portions of the mosaic were destroyed. A pillar of the 

 new church was driven through the midst of the mosaic (seen on 

 the plate in rectangular blank at the southern extremity of the Dead 

 Sea). Large parts were covered by cement for the flooring of the 

 new church. In this condition Father Cleopas Koikyhdes, librarian 

 of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, found the mosaic in 1896 and took 

 steps for its preservation by imbedding the fragments in the floor 

 of the new church. To judge from the remains, the map had previ- 

 ously undergone several restorations. For in several portions a plain 

 mosaic or merely cement fiUs out destroyed parts. Though rather 

 a primitive and crude way of repairing works of art, it substantiaUy 

 contributed to the preservation of the monument by preventing 

 further crumbling of the remaining parts. 



THE BOUNDARIES OF THE MAP. 



The following is suggested as mere conjecture. The longest con- 

 nected fragment reaches an extension of about 35 feet from the spring 

 of Aenon near Sahm in the north to the delta of the Nile in the south, 

 while the church of which the mosaic formed the pavement is about 

 55 feet wide. There would thus remain a lacuna of about 20 feet.| 



It may perhaps be assumed that the region of the Nfle Delta, which 

 alone is related to the Biblical narrative because the Israehtes 

 sojourned there before they set out to Canaan, represents the original 



1 So Kubitschek (p. 348), who gives the dimensions, respectively, "over 10.5 meters," "17 meters," and 

 "6 5 meters " Bsazley (p. 517), assumes "that the original once occupied a space of about 49 by 20 feet 

 and that "what remains in aU (is) about half of the complete scheme," while Father Cleopas is quoted in 

 the Biblical W^orld for 1898 (p. 254) , calculating that "the fragments remaming contain about ]« s<]uare 

 meters, and the map originaUy covered 280 square meters." 



