PALESTINE MONTGOMERY. 437 
of life in which that ancient people moved. The solid remains of 
architecture are to be laid bare. These will teach us the engineering 
and artistic abilities of the people, which we could not realize from 
written books. What appears to be a more minute line of investiga- 
tion lies in the crumbled remains of domestic economy, the fragments 
of pottery and utensils; and yet these potsherds have revealed more 
to us than almost any other source. From the broken bits we can 
build up a picture of the whole object, Ave can learn how far advanced 
the people were in material ingenuity and artistic achievement. Also 
these slight objects enable us to trace the relations of civilization and 
to date the epochs of the strata according to the known chronologies of 
the better known histories of other lands. Much of such work is 
minutely scientific and painstaking and can not well be followed bj^ 
the lay mind, but it is withal of indispensable value. 
Then there are the rem.ains of the ancient religious life, which, for 
Palestine, the home of our western religion, are obviously the most 
interesting subject of research. Ancient life was predominantly re- 
ligious ; it put forth its most enduring expression in the symbols of 
religion. In Egypt and Babylonia it is almost exclusively the 
temples and tombs that have yielded our greatest prizes, for apart 
from some royal palaces those buildings were the most enduringly 
built. And so everywhere in Palestine, wherever there was a human 
settlement, we find the remains of a sanctuary. These, to be sure, in 
that land were not ponderous temples, but rather very simple open- 
air structures, but as they were built of stone enough remains to pic- 
ture the actual rites that were celebrated in the sanctuary and to make 
our inferences as to the ultimate religious beliefs. Also, as the con- 
cern for the dead was an integral part of the religion, the rock-hewn 
tombs and burial shafts are a prime source of knowledge for the 
archeologist, and in some cases, as with the magnificent so-called 
sarcophagus of Alexander, found at Sidon, they yield us remarkable 
finds in the way of art. In general, they throw light upon that most 
delicate form of human faith, the beliefs concerning the dead. 
Peculiarly in Palestine the archeological remains are of value not 
so much in typifying the religion of the land which we associate 
with the Bible as in illustrating the en-\ironment out of which that 
religion grew and which was its foil and antagonist. The spiritual 
thought of the prophets and the psalmists, of Jesus Christ and His 
Apostles, never found, perhaps could not find, an expression in solid 
creations. In any case the Hebrews were not an architectural or 
artistic people and created no art of their own. Also the first Chris- 
tian age built and left no memorials in stone, although for the later 
Christian history, from Constantine on, Syria is a land rich in me- 
morials of the earliest Christian architecture, vying in this respect 
12573°— 21 29 
