The knowledge of Palestine was but slight, and of northern Syria
nothing to speak of, a century ago. Travellers with some scientific
ability, such as Robinson (1838 and 1852), De Saulcy (1853), and
Van de Velde (1854), greatly extended our view and led up to the
splendid survey by the Palestine Exploration Fund (1866 and on), which
exhausted the surface study of the land. The more archæological work of
excavation was begun at Jerusalem (1867–70), and resumed (1892–99) at
Lachish, Jerusalem, etc. The topographical results are all important,
and leave nothing to be done until excavation can be freely applied;
and the small amount of digging yet done has fixed the varieties of
pottery back to 2000 B. C. and given some early architecture. But the
ruins of Syria, and indeed of Turkey in general, are practically yet
untouched. The discovery (1868) of the inscription of Mesha, King of
Moab (896 B. C.), opened a new prospect of research which cannot yet
be entered upon. In the north of Syria nothing has been done except
the German work at Singerli, from which came an Aramean inscription of
about 740 B. C. And in the south a large number of early inscriptions
of the Arabian dynasties, reaching back some centuries B. C., have been
copied; but there, also, excavation is impossible.
The main new light from Syria has been on the Hittite power.
Burckhardt, in 1812, had noticed a new kind of hieroglyph at Hamath.
After several ineffective copies, Wright made casts of the stones
in 1872. Several other such inscriptions have been found, and from
these and the Egyptian and Assyrian references to the Hittites we now
realize that they were a northern people, with a great capital on the
Euphrates, at Karkhemish, and ruling over nearly all Syria and Asia
Minor. Little has yet been fixed about the writing; a few signs are
read and some have passed into the Cypriote alphabet. A striking proof
of the spread of Babylonian culture is seen in the tablets found in
Egypt at Tel-el-Amarna in 1887, which show that all the correspondence
between Egypt and Syria in the fifteenth century B. C. was carried on
in cuneiform. These hundreds of letters give a vivid picture of life in
Syria at that early date.