THE RUINED CITIES OF PALESTINE, ETC. 



17 



residence of King Og. The following passages of Scripture 

 refer to Edrei : — 



" Og, the King of Bashan, went out against them, he and 

 all his people, to battle at Edrei " (Num. xxi, 33). " Moses 

 .... after he had smitten . . . . Og the King of Bashan 

 which dwelt in Ashtaroth at Edrei" (Deut. i, 4). " Salecah 

 and Edrei, cities of the Kingdom of Og " (Deut. iii, 10). 



The most prominent of the ruins, covering a circuit of two miles, 

 are those of a large reservoir of Roman times, fed by a great 

 aqueduct. There is a building, 44 by 31 yards, with a double 

 colonnade, evidently a Christian cathedral but now a mosque. 

 The most notable remains, however, are the caves beneath 

 the citadel. They form a subterranean city, a labyrinth of 

 streets with shops and houses, and a market-place. This 

 probably dates in its present elaborate form from Greek times, 

 but such refuges must always have been the feature of a land 

 so swept by Arab tribes. The Crusaders who besieged it called 

 it Adratum {Encyclojpoedia Bihlica). 



Merril writes : " When King Baldwin III (1144-1162) and 

 his Crusaders made their wild chase to Bozrah, they went by 

 way of Dra'a. The weather was hot, and the army was suffering 

 terribly for want of water, but as often as they let down their 

 buckets by means of ropes into the cisterns, men concealed 

 on the inside of the cisterns would cut the ropes and thus defeat 

 their efforts." Probably the underground city has connection 

 with all the important cisterns of the place. 



From Edrei we travel to Jerash, or Gerasa, which is a city 

 of stupendous ruins, second only to Palmyra in size and 

 importance, and second only to Baalbec in beauty of archi- 

 tecture. In many respects it surpasses them both, and as a 

 perfect specimen of an ancient Grecian city it has no equal. 

 These ruins, says Dr. Tristran, " in number, in beauty of situation 

 and in isolation, were by far the most striking and interesting 

 I had yet seen in Syria." The later name, Philadelphia, was 

 given to the city by Ptolemy II (Philadelphus), King of Egypt, 

 who rebuilt the city in the third century B.C. Greek immi- 

 gration flowed into Syria after the conquest of Alexander the 

 Great. The Greeks gradually extended beyond Jordan, some- 

 times occupying the old sites and sometimes building new 

 cities, as at Jerash. 



According to Pliny, Gerasa was one of the original ten cities 

 of the Decapolis. It is mentioned by Ptolemy, Strabo, Pliny 



c 2 



