ON LAND TENURE IN ANCIENT TIMES. 189 
nient a system surviving so long, is proof in itself of antiquity, 
and I can only say if a shifting severalty has recently sprung up in 
Palestine, it is much more wonderful than that it should have 
survived. 
Mr. Sauvuet Bercuriw.—Asa native of Palestine and one having 
had extensive property there, I might mention the fact that village- 
communities at a short distance off the high roads have different 
laws from the village-communities close to the high roads. It seems 
that the different nations who held Palestine at various periods, 
such as the Greeks, the Saracens, the Crusaders, and the Turks, 
passed laws which were adopted by the people living in villages 
near to the high roads, but that these laws were not adopted in the 
villages at a distance from the high road, say of 5 to 10 miles. 
In such villages older laws and customs have been kept up; in 
fact, many of the words used by the inhabitants are different to 
those used in the ordinary language. Some of their words are not 
Arabic, but probably a form of Hebrew. For instance, in the 
expression hhalkath watta: if you were to ask an Arab what 
hhalkath meant, he would probably say that there was no such 
word; but if you were to go to a villuge such as Abu Shusheh (the 
ancient Gezer), there they would tell you at once that it meant “a 
portion of land.” So with the apportioning of land, the land near 
the towns is not mushuw ; each piece of land is freehold. It was 
made so by a law brought in by the Turks, who have often tried 
to enforce this law in the whole country, and thus to do away with 
those rights of cultivation, mushaa’, but have failed to do so. 
When my brother and I bought the lauds of a village some years 
since from its inhabitants, the Turkish authorities recognised us 
as the freeholders, and gave us title deeds, in accordance with a 
law on freehold passed by the late Sultan about twenty years ago. 
Not so, however, the inhabitants of the village, for when we came 
to portion out the land in plots for cultivation, the villagers pro- 
tested and refused to accept the new arrangement. They would 
only have the land in mushaa’, as explained in the paper just read. 
These laws, or customs, of cultivating the land still exist, and the 
people refuse to change them. 
Mr. Sersoum.—May I add one word which I forgot to say on 
the alleged absence of documentary evidence for the existence of 
the open field system in France in ancient times. It seems to me 
that there is documentary evidence of an indirect but conclusive 
kind. As in Saxon charters, so in the early charters of France, 
By 
