Haifa, Sept. 24.—During the two months that I have been camped on the
highest summit of Mount Carmel, I have visited no fewer than twenty
ruins of ancient towns and villages. Of these I have discovered six
which were heretofore unknown, the others having been found ten years
ago by the officers of the Royal Engineers sent out to survey Palestine
by the Society for Palestine Exploration.
Prior to that time, this historic locality was a _terra incognita_. The
tourists who visited the mountain, like the pilgrims who journeyed
thither for devotional reasons, satisfied themselves with a short stay
at the convent, and even then did not understand that they were only on
one mountain spur of a highland region thirty-five miles in
circumference, where almost every hilltop was crowned with a ruin, and
every gorge might open up new and unexpected beauties of scenery.
It is only after so exhaustive an examination as I have just
accomplished that any idea can be formed of the extent of the population
by which Carmel was once inhabited, of the high state of civilization
which must have prevailed here, and of the extent to which its lovely
hills and valleys were cultivated. These ruins bear a great resemblance
to each other; and although none of them covers a very great extent of
ground, they were built of most solid materials, and, to judge by some
of the architectural remains, and the elaborate carvings and devices,
they must have contained some handsome buildings.
The houses were built of blocks of drafted stone, usually four feet long
by two and a half high, and two thick. The door-jambs and lintels, which
in some instances are still in situ, were often seven or eight feet long
by two feet six by two feet. In these were holes or sockets, in which
the pivots worked. Some of the lintels over the doors were ornamented
with devices; these were usually hexagons and circles, in the centre of
which were ovals or other ornamental scrolls. Sometimes there was a bird
or an animal, such as an eagle or a leopard, or seven-branched
candlesticks, or raised bosses or crosses; here and there was a cornice
with a florid carving, evidently of the Roman period, with fragments of
columns or capitals. But some of these ruins have been inhabited by
later inhabitants, who used the old stones for their modern
constructions, and too often chipped off the carving. Indeed, they are
the ready-made quarries of the country people of the present day, who
come and carry off the stones to build their houses.
A notable and melancholy instance of this has occurred in the case of a
place called Khurbet Semmaka. This was the most interesting ruin in
Carmel, and was discovered ten years ago by the officers of the
Palestine Exploration Survey. Here they found the portal of what once
had been an ancient Jewish synagogue still standing, its door-jambs and
lintels elaborately carved; part of the walls and fragments of the
columns which formed an enclosing colonnade were in position, and formed
the subject of much speculation, as it was the only specimen of Jewish
architecture in this part of the country, and presented some features
which were different from anything hitherto discovered; and it was
therefore suggested that the building must have been built at a
different period from any of those the remains of which still exist.
Judge of my disappointment on visiting this spot to find that, with the
exception of three feet of one door-jamb, all had disappeared; there was
scarcely a stone left. The inhabitants of a Moslem village about two
miles distant had within the last decade made a clean sweep of all these
most interesting remains. Fortunately they still exist in the Palestine
Society's Memoirs in the shape of most elaborate drawings and
measurements, which were made by the Survey and have since been
published.
Apart from the actual stones themselves and the carvings which are to be
found upon them, the objects of interest which mainly characterize all
these Carmel ruins are ancient olive-mills and wine-presses, often in a
very perfect state of preservation, tombs and cisterns. First, in regard
to the olive-mills. I found more than a dozen of these. On two occasions
they were hewn out of the living rock. The lower stone, which was
circular, had usually a diameter of eight feet, with a raised rim
outside nine or ten inches high, and a raised socket in the centre, in
which was a hole a foot square, where the upright was fitted to hold the
lateral beam which worked the upper stone. This was usually five feet in
diameter and eighteen inches thick, and had a hole pierced through the
centre. Through this the long beam was passed, to which, as it extended
far beyond the circumference of the lower stone, the horse was attached
which worked the mill, the upper stone travelling on its broad edge
around the lower stone, over the olives. From the lower stone a gutter
was carved into the vat, also hewn out of the living rock, into which
trickled the oil. I often found near these mills huge limestone rollers
about three feet in diameter and seven feet long. On the sides of these
were four vertical lines of sunk grooves, four or five grooves in each
line. Taking 2.7 as the specific gravity of the stone, they must have
weighed about two tons each. What their functions were, or whether they
had anything to do with the olive-crushing process, I am at a loss to
conjecture. The wine-presses were nothing more than huge vats, also hewn
out of the living rock, sometimes above ground, in the shape of
sarcophagi, sometimes pits eight or nine feet square and the same in
depth.
The limestone hillsides in the neighbourhood of these ruins were almost
invariably honeycombed with cave tombs, whose doorways were often rudely
ornamented with devices, and in one instance I found an inscription in
Greek characters so much defaced that I could not decipher it. They
usually consisted of only one chamber, eight or ten feet square, but
were sometimes larger, and contained either kokim or loculi under
arcosolia, sometimes both. The kokim are tunnel-shaped excavations,
usually seven feet long, two feet six wide, and the same in height—in
other words, just large enough to contain a corpse. The loculus is an
oblong tomb, with sides about two feet high, also large enough
conveniently to contain a body. It is cut out of the living rock, as
well as the arch which overspans it. Sometimes there is a large, arched
recess opening out of the central chamber, containing several loculi. On
more than one occasion I found a circular stone like a millstone in a
groove in the doorway, which only required to be rolled a couple of feet
to close the tomb completely, but the tombs are generally closed by an
oblong stone slab, not unfrequently ornamented with devices. I also
found several sarcophagi.
The cisterns are of two kinds, bell-mouthed and of demijohn shape, or
open rock-hewn reservoirs or tanks. At one ruin I found an extensive
system of these latter. There were no fewer than six, of which the
largest was forty feet square, all close together, divided only by
narrow ledges of the solid rock out of which they had been hewn. They
were from fifteen to twenty feet to the soil at the bottom, now
overgrown with shrubs, so that in reality they are probably much deeper.
In some cases stone steps lead to the bottom, and on the sides were deep
niches from which evidently sprang arches to form the roof, for there
can be little doubt that the most of them were originally covered. From
the great number and extent of these cisterns it is manifest that the
inhabitants were, in some instances, entirely dependent upon them for
their water supply.
At the southeastern extremity of the mountain is the spot known as “the
place of burning,” or sacrifice, because tradition assigns it as the
locality where Elijah had his controversy with the prophets of Baal, and
in commemoration thereof the Carmelite monks are at this moment building
a church there, and using, by the way, some of the carved stones of a
neighbouring ruin, regardless of all antiquarian considerations. I feel,
therefore, a malignant satisfaction in the conviction at which I have
arrived that they are building their church on a spot which is
indisputably not the place on which the altar of Elijah was erected, if
we are to believe the Biblical record, for it is in full view of the
Mediterranean, and it would have been quite unnecessary for Elijah to
tell his servant to “go up and look toward the sea,” for there is no
higher point to go up to, and he could see the sea himself. But about a
mile from this spot there stands, curiously enough, a pile of stones in
a locality which would exactly fulfil the required conditions. I came
upon it unexpectedly, almost concealed in a thicket of underwood. The
stones are placed one upon the other without cement, and average
eighteen inches square and eight or nine thick, forming a rude altar
about twelve feet long and four high. The breadth varies, as they have
been broken away, but there is a large artificial slab, six feet square,
lying at the base. Though I do not for a moment mean to imply that this
was the original altar, the unusual shape and position of this pile
suggests that it may have been the result of some sacred tradition
connected with the Biblical event, or it may be the remains of an
ancient vineyard watch-tower. From it the ground swells back and upward
in every direction, so that a vast host might have been assembled around
and witnessed whatever was going forward, which would have been
impossible at the traditional locality. A ten minutes' walk would have
taken Elijah's servant to a neighbouring summit which commanded a full
view of the sea, and the twelve barrels of water required to drench the
altar could have been obtained from some rock-hewn tanks in the
immediate vicinity, while the path that passes the pile leads straight
down to the hill on the bank of the Kishon, where tradition has it that
the priests were massacred. Moreover, it was in the centre of the most
populous part of the mountain. Within a radius of two miles and a half
from this pile of stones there are no fewer than twelve ruins of ancient
towns and villages on the various hill-tops and mountain-spurs which
surround it.
No fact could give a better idea than this of the populous character of
Carmel in the days of the prophet. Not very far from this I discovered,
half-way down the steep flank of the mountain, a fortress of a most
ancient race, the stones which were piled one above another three high
to form the rampart being immense natural unhewn boulders weighing from
two to three tons each. I am not aware of anything of the kind having
yet been found in Palestine, and as carrying one back to a period
probably anterior to Jewish occupation, I regard it as the most
interesting discovery I have made on Carmel.