T HE Editors of the present series having done me the honour to ask me briefly to relate the story of Palestine Exploration, and especially of the expeditions which I commanded; and having stipulated that the book should contain not only an account of the more interesting results of that work, but also something of the personal adventures of those employed, I have endeavoured to record what seems of most interest in both respects. Many things here said will be found at greater length in previous

T HE long narrow strip of country on the east shore of the Mediterranean, which in a manner was the centre of the ancient world, has in all ages been a land of pilgrimage. For five hundred miles it stretches from the deserts of Sinai to the rugged Taurus, and its width, shut in between the Syrian deserts and the sea, is rarely more than fifty miles. It can never be quite the same to us as other lands, bound up as it is with our earliest memories, with the Bible and the story of the faith; and it

N EARLY every tourist in Palestine lands at Jaffa, and thence travels to Jerusalem. The open roadstead, the yellow dunes, the distant shadowy mountains, the brown town on its hillock, the palms, the orange-gardens and the picturesque crowd are familiar to very many of my readers. So are the paths over the plain, the mud villages and cactus hedges, the great minaret tower of Ramleh, and the rough mountains, with scattered copses of mastic and oak, with stone hamlets and terraced olive groves, thr

M Y first experiences of Palestine survey were from the camp at Nâblus, [35] the ancient Shechem. The method which we then employed was very little varied throughout the whole period of our labours. The camp, consisting of three or four tents, was pitched in some convenient central position by a town or village. Thence we were able to ride eight or ten miles all round, and first visited a few of the highest hill-tops, where, when the observations with the theodolites were complete, we built grea

T HE third province of Western Palestine is divided into two regions—Upper and Lower Galilee. Lower Galilee was surveyed in 1872 and 1875. Upper Galilee was completed in 1877 under the direction of my companion, Lieutenant Kitchener, R.E., who joined the party in the autumn of 1875. During this year, when the field party was engaged in Upper Galilee, I was employed in London in charge of the drawing of the map, executed by Ordnance Survey draughtsmen, and writing the Memoirs of the country alrea

T HE survey of Western Palestine was happily complete in 1877, and the map was out in the following year; but the Memoirs were still not half published when, in 1881, I was again given command of a party instructed to carry the work east of Jordan. The adventures of the fifteen months which followed were far more exciting than any encountered west of the river. Even in 1877, when it was thought that some trouble might arise, the condition of affairs was really favourable, as the Turkish Governme

N ORTH of Heshbon the country rises slightly, and we enter the region surrounding the large ruined city of ’Ammân—the Rabbath Ammon of the Bible and the Roman Philadelphia. This was the most important ruin surveyed in Palestine, as regards its antiquarian interest, and the best specimen of a Roman town that I visited, except the still more wonderful ruins of Gerasa, which yield only to Baalbek and Palmyra among Syrian capitals of the second century of our era. On the slopes below the plateau in

P ALESTINE proper—from Dan to Beersheba—extends only over the southern half of the Syrian coast which runs northwards to the Bay of Alexandretta, distant 370 miles from Gaza. Yet there is no true geographical division which separates Palestine from Syria, and it is only because the Land of Israel attracts our interest chiefly, that the northern region of Lebanon and the Land of the Hittites is less generally visited. The scenery is perhaps finer than that of Palestine, the antiquities are more i

I PROPOSE to conclude this volume by a slight sketch of the results which have been gathered by exploration in Palestine. In journals or memoirs the importance of these results is hardly to be appreciated in their scattered form, and I find that they have certainly not yet been grasped even by learned writers who have penned accounts of the country quite recently in England. These results are geological, geographical, physical, antiquarian, ethnical, and biblical, or, more widely speaking, histo

T HE most celebrated of the controversies connected with Palestine refer to the site of the Temple of Herod and to that of the Holy Sepulchre. I have given an estimate of the results of exploration as affecting both subjects in various works, but since their publication other writers (not the majority) have in some cases reverted to the views which were held before exploration commenced, and which were deduced from literary researches. The latest work on the subject (Professor Hayter Lewis’ “The