September 26, 1890.] 



SCIENCE, 



171 



natural soil about fifty feet above the stream which runs through 

 tlie wadi below. The mounrl is about two hundred feet square. 



Mr. Petrie's description of it reads lilie the record of Dr. Schh'e 

 ruann's discoveries at Troy. City has been piled upon cit-', the 

 latest colonists being Greeks, whose settlement was itself swept 

 avray before the age of Alexander the Great. The lowf st and 

 earliest city was the most important, if we may judge from the 

 size of the wall with which it was encircled. Thi^ was 28 feet 8 

 inches thick, and was formed, like the walls of an Egyptian city, 

 of clay bricks baked in the sun. It had been twice repaired in the 

 course of its history, and it still stands to a height of twenty-one 

 feet. As thin black Phcenician pottery was found above it, which 

 Egyptian excavation has shown to be not later than about B.C. 

 1100, we may follow Mr. Petrie in regarding the wall as that of 

 one of those Amorite cities which, as we are told, were "walled 

 up to heaven " (Deut. i. 28). It is the first authentic memorial of 

 the ancient Canaanitish population whjch has been discovered in 

 Palestine. As large quantities of potsherds have been met with 

 both outside and within it, we now know the precise characteris- 

 tics of Amorite pottery, and can consequently tell the age of a site 

 on which it occurs. 



The city to which tlie wall belonged was taken and destroyed, 

 and the wall itself vias allowed to fall into ruin. Then catne a 

 period when the site was occupied by rude herdsmen or squatters, 

 unskilled in the arts either of making bricks or of fortifying 

 towns. Their huts were built of mud and rolled stones from the 

 wadi below, and resembled the wretched "shanties" of the half- 

 savage Bedouin, which we may still see on the outskirts of the 

 Holy Land. They must have been inhabited by members of the 

 invading Israelitish tribes who had overthrown the civilization 

 tliat had long existed in the cities of Canaan, and were still in a 

 condition of nomadic barbarism. We may gather from the Book 

 of Judges that the period was brought to an end by the organiz- 

 ing efforts of Samuel and the defeat of the Philistines by Saul. 

 With ihe foundation of the Israelitish monarchy came a new epoch 

 of prosperity and culture. Jerusalem and other cities were en- 

 larged and fortified (1 Kings ix. 1.5-19), and the Chronicler tells 

 us (3 Chron. xi. 5) that after the revolt of the Ten Tribes the 

 chief cities of Judah were further strengthened by Rehoboam. 

 The ruins of Tel el-Hesy furnish numerous evidences of this new 

 epoch of building. First of all, we have a wall of crude brick 

 thirteen feet thick, which is probably identical with a wall traced 

 by Mr Petrie along the western and northern faces of the tel, where 

 it ends in a tower at the north-west corner. However this may 

 be, the fection laid bare by the stream on the eastern face of the 

 tel shows that the thirteen foot wall was repaired and rebuilt three 

 or four times over. All these rebuildings must be referred to the 

 age of the Kings, since the only remains of post-exilic times dis- 

 coveied on the mound are those of the Greek settlement of the 

 fift'i century B.C. 



One of the later rebuildings is illustrated by a massive brick 

 wall twenty-five feet thick, and of considerable height, which Mr. 

 Petrie has discovered on the southern slope of the tel, and which 

 he refers to the reign of Manasseh. It has been built above a 

 glacis formed of large blocks of stone, the faces of which were 

 covered with plaster, filr. Petrie has traced the glacis to a height 

 of forty feet, and has found that it was approached by a flight of 

 steps, at the foot of which, in the valley, was a fortified building, 

 of which only the gateway now remains. The earth on which 

 the glacis rests is piled ten feet deep around a large building 

 eighty-five feet in length, and composed of crude brick walls 

 more than four feet in thickness. Ten feet below the building 

 are the ruins of another large building, which, after having been 

 burned, was rudely put together again out of the old materials. 

 The original edifice was of crude brick, with doorways of " fine 

 white limestone.'' Several slabs of the latter have been discov- 

 ered. On three of them is "a curious foiin of decoration by a 

 shallow pilaster, with very sloping side, resting on a low cushion 

 base, and with a volute at the top." As Mr. Petrie remarks, " we 

 are here face to face at last with work of the earlier Je!\ isb tings, 

 probably executed by the same school of masons who built and 

 adorned the Temple of Solomon." In the volute Mr. Petrie sees a 

 representation of aran\"s horn, and calls to mind the biblical expres- 



sion. " the horns of the altar." Whether this be so or not the 

 volute is an earlier form of that which characterizes the Ionic 

 capital. On one of the slabs is a graffito, which must have been 

 scratched upon the stone by one of the subjects of Solomon or his 

 immediate successors It represents a lion or dog walking; and, 

 as the slab was built into the reconstructed edifice upside down, 

 the drawing must have been made while the stone still formed 

 part of the original edifice. This can hardly have been erected at 

 a later date than the reign of Rehoboam. • 



The stones of the glacis have led Mr. Petrie to a very important 

 conclusion. They are draughted, the sm-face of the stone being 

 smoothed away towards the edges so as to leave a rough projection 

 in the middle. But they show no trace of th? claw-tool, or comb- 

 pick, as Mr. Petrie prefers to call il. Now, this tool is characteris- 

 tic of Greek work ; and as it was used in Greece in the pre-Persian 

 era, while it was introduced into Egypt only after the contact of 

 Egypt with Greece, we may infer that it was of Greek invention. 

 Its employment in Palestine, therefore, would imply that any 

 building in which it was used belonged to the Greek age, Mr. 

 Petrie's excavations at Tel el-Hesy having shown that older Jewish 

 work exhibits no traces of it: consequently the dispute as to the 

 age of the Haram wall at Jerusalem is at la'-t settled. Here the 

 stones have been dressed with a claw-tool froai the foundation 

 upwards, and it becomes clear, accordingly, that they must all be 

 referred to an Herodian date. I have always felt doubtful about 

 the antiquity commonly ascribed to them on the strength of cer- 

 tam masons' marks pronounced by Mr. Deutsch to be early 

 Phoenician characters. But it is questionable whether they are 

 characters at all: at any rate, they do not belong to an early 

 form of the Phoenician alphabet, and no argument can be drawn 

 from them as to the pre-exilic origin of the monument on which 

 they occur. 



But while the date of the great wall which surrounds the 

 Mosque of Omar at Jerusalem is thus brought down to the classi- 

 cal period, the very fact which has reduced its claims to antiquity 

 has served to establish the pre-exilic character of another monu- 

 ment near Hebron. This is the Ramet-el-Khalil, or "Shrine of 

 Abraham," about three mUes to the north of Hebron. The huge 

 blocks of stone of which this building was composed have never 

 been touched by the claw-tool, and we may therefore see in them 

 the relics of a temple the foundation of which must be older than 

 the exile. Can it represent the site of Kirjath-sepher, the Canaan- 

 ite " city of books '' ? 



In Tel el-Hesy Mr. Petrie sees the ruins of Lachish.i The spring 

 which flowed beneath its walls is, as has been said, the only foun- 

 tain of fresh water which gushes from the soil for many miles 

 around; and the spot would naturally, therefore, have been selected 

 as the site of an important fortress. How precious such a supply 

 of water would be may be judged from the fact that the brackish 

 stream which flows from the smaller and more insignificant Tel 

 en-Nejileh was in ancient times confined there by a massive dam. 

 We know that Lachish was one of the chief fortresses of Judsea, 

 and its capture by Sennacherib was considered sufficiently memora- 

 ble to be depicted in a bas-relief on the walls of that monarch's 

 palace; we know also that it stood somewhere in the neighbor- 

 hood of the present Tel el-Hesy. On the other hand, the name cf 

 Khurbet 'Ajlan, given to an adjoining site, might incline us to 

 believe that the tel represents Eglon rather than Lachish. Eglon 

 and Lachish, however were close to one another, and, considering 

 that Lachish was the larger and more important town of the two, 

 Mr. Petrie is probably right in locating it at Tel el Hesy. In that 

 case Tel en-Nejileh will be Eglon. 



If Tel el Hesy is Lachish, the monuments of sculpture and in- 

 scription overthrown there by Sennacherib must still be lying 

 within its ruins. Indeed, even more precious relics of the past 

 may await the explorer of the old Amorite city. Among the tab- 

 lets discovered at Tel el-Amarna are despatches to the Egyptian 

 king from Zimridi and Yabniel, the governors of Lachish, which 

 prove that the art of writing the Babylonian language in cunei- 

 form characters upon clay was known and practised there. The 

 city was the seat of a governor, and it is reasonable to suppose 



1 Major Conder hafl already suggested the same identification (Memoirs ot 

 the Survey of Western Palestine, iii. p. 261). 



