Haifa, March 31.—From Khisfin, the ruins of which I described in my last
letter, I struck off in a westerly direction under the guidance of the
sheik who had been my host the night before, and who, now that he was
convinced that I had nothing to do with tax-gathering, and was only
possessed by what must have seemed to him an insane desire to find old
stones and make pictures of them, took an evident pleasure in
ministering to such a harmless form of insanity; in fact he became quite
a bore on the subject. As he was naturally unable to appreciate any
distinction between one old stone and another, he was constantly making
me ride out of my way to look at some weather-beaten piece of basalt
which had a fancied resemblance to a wild animal; or to a mound, the
ruins on which belonged to a village that had been deserted within the
last twenty years. Still I never could afford to treat his assurances
with indifference, as there was always the possibility, until I
satisfied myself to the contrary, that the stones to which he was
guiding me might possess interest; and indeed on one occasion they did,
for they turned out to be the ruins of a Roman town, where a few
fragments of columns and capitals still remained to bear testimony to
the particular civilization to which they belonged, and which, although
they did not present any striking architectural features—indeed, the
remains were somewhat insignificant—it was always a satisfaction to have
been the first to discover. The name of these ruins was Esfera.
Near them a very singular and unpleasant accident occurred to me. I rode
my horse to drink at what seemed a muddy puddle, which was about ten or
twelve feet in diameter. Instead of being content to drink at the
margin, he took two steps into it, and suddenly disappeared head first;
that is, his head disappeared, his hind-quarters remained for a moment
poised above the water just long enough to enable me to throw myself off
backward into about two feet of puddle. We had walked into an overflowed
well. When his hind-quarters at last went down into it his head came up,
or, at all events, as much of it as was required for breathing and
snorting, which he did prodigiously, evidently in a panic of terror,
while I stood drenched and shivering on the bank in the cold east wind
and sleet, wondering how we were ever to get him out. The poor beast was
out of his depth, but the dimensions of the well were too limited to
enable him to swim, or even to scramble freely. Fortunately I had sent
on my saddlebags by my servant, or the animal would have been hopelessly
weighted down. As it was, it was only by the united efforts of the party
tugging at the bridle and stirrup-leathers that, after many futile
efforts, at the end of each of which he fell back and for a moment
disappeared altogether, we ultimately succeeded in extricating him.
Meantime my own plight was in the last degree unenviable, the more
especially as I was not in very good health at the time, a consideration
which induced my companion, with a truly commendable devotion, to take
off his nether garments and insist on my wearing them instead of my own,
while he performed the remainder of the day's journey in the slight
protection which he wore beneath them.
It was in this guise, and while still discussing my strange mishap, that
our attention was suddenly arrested by finding ourselves surrounded by
what are perhaps the most interesting of antiquarian objects, a number
of dolmens. In a very limited area—none of them were over two hundred
yards apart—I counted twenty. The subject of these rude stone monuments
of a prehistoric age is so interesting that I will venture on a few
words in regard to them.
The most remarkable point about Syrian dolmens is, that while they have
been found in numbers to the east of the Jordan, not one has been
discovered in Judea or Samaria, and only two or three in Galilee; and
those are doubtful specimens. Indeed, it is only of late years that they
have attracted the notice of explorers east of the Jordan; but since
attention has been specially directed to the subject, we have constantly
been having new discoveries. Six years ago I found one of the first at a
spot not more than twenty miles from the hitherto unknown field I had
now come upon. That dolmen stood alone, and being previously unaware of
their existence in this part of the world, I examined it with the
greatest interest. Since then Captain Conder, during his hurried survey
in Moab, has found above seven hundred in that part of the country, and
the result has been that the controversy as to the purpose for which
they were designed has been reopened with renewed vigor.
The dolmen, which usually consists of three perpendicular stones forming
three sides of a small chamber, with a single huge covering slab as its
roof, is found in almost every part of the world except America, though
I saw a notice in a paper the other day of one having been discovered in
Missouri. There are stone monuments in Central America, I believe,
somewhat resembling them, but I am not aware that the point has been
satisfactorily determined, and it is of the highest interest that it
should be, as it would establish the existence of general contact
between the universal families of that ancient stock which preceded both
the Aryan and Semitic races, and which belonged, therefore, to the
illiterate and prehistoric age of the use of bronze and of flint.
Dolmens have been found in almost every country in Europe. They are
numerous in the British Isles, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Prussia,
and the south of Russia. I have myself found them in the mountains of
Circassia, and they exist in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, in great
numbers in Algeria and the north coast of Africa, in Asia Minor and
India, and we have recently heard of them in Japan! Wherever they exist
are generally to be found menhirs, or single monolithic stones, and
stone circles, such as Stonehenge in England, or long rows of standing
stones, such as those to be found at Carnac in Brittany, or smaller
stone circles, such as are common to the east of the Jordan. Those found
in Syria are generally placed in a position commanding an extensive view
and in close proximity to water. They are either “free standing,” that
is, quite alone and isolated, or they are covered by cairns of stones;
or they are, as the majority were in this instance, perched upon piles
of stones.
It has been hitherto supposed that in all these cases they were
sepulchral monuments, but it has been recently suggested that those
alone beneath the cairns may have served this purpose, and those which
were free standing or on cairns may have been used as altars. The basis
for this conjecture consists in the fact that the flat covering stones
of the Syrian dolmens are very often provided with cups or hollows,
which may have served to hold sacrificial oil; and, moreover, the free
standing dolmens are often on smooth rock, so that it would not be
possible to inter a body beneath them. I have seen the covering slab to
be as large as eleven feet long by five wide, though those in the field
I was now examining were much smaller, some of the covering stones not
being above five feet by three or four; this was probably owing to their
being of basalt, which is much heavier than ordinary stone. Nearly all
were trilithons, the covering slab being sometimes held in position by
pebbles inserted under it; and in many instances they appeared to have a
slight slant which was not the result of accident.
The natives here call them “Jews' burial-grounds,” showing that the
local tradition is in favor of their being sepulchral monuments, though
it is very certain they date from a period long anterior to the Jews.
Indeed, the probability is that the disappearance of these monuments
from western Palestine, where they no doubt existed, is due to the
command to destroy heathen monuments. Thus, in Deuteronomy, we find
again and again repeated injunctions to overthrow the Canaanite altars,
and to break or smash their pillars. These exhortations we find carried
into practice by Hezekiah and Josiah in Judea, and as the Book of
Deuteronomy was held sacred by the ten tribes as well as by the two, we
are justified in supposing that they carried out the order in Samaria
and Galilee. But the land to the east of the Jordan always contained a
mixed population, over which the kings of Israel and Judah exercised but
little control. Baal worship was rife in Bashan, Gilead, and Moab in the
days of Jeremiah, and the reforming zeal of Hezekiah did not affect the
land where Chemosh and Ishtar, Baal, Peor, Nebo, and Meni yet continued
to be worshipped. This accounts for dolmens not having been found,
except with a few doubtful specimens, in Galilee to the west of the
Jordan.
With the exception of the roughly excavated hollows in the covering
slab, these rude stone monuments of Syria have, so far as is known,
neither ornamentation nor rune nor other mark of the engraver's tool. In
comparatively few instances they are made of hewn stone, very roughly
cut, but generally they are of natural blocks and slabs entirely
unformed. Thus, if there be any comparative scale of antiquity on which
we can rely connected with the finish of the monument, the Syrian
dolmens may claim to be considered among the oldest of their kind.
The word “dolmen,” usually rendered table-stone, should, according to
Max Müller, be more properly translated “holed” stone, implying either a
gateway, such as is formed by the trilithon, or else applying to menhirs
and dolmens pierced with a hole, as in the case of the Ring stone, the
Odin stone, and a peculiar class of holed dolmens. The one I saw in
Circassia was of this latter category. Instead of three stones
supporting the covering slab, as is almost invariably the case in Syria,
there were four, and in the centre of the fourth was a circular hole,
about eighteen inches in diameter, or just large enough to allow a thin
man to squeeze through. Some have supposed these holes to be connected
with some sacrificial rite, others to be due to the superstition that
the dead could not rest in peace in tombs without an inlet for air. But
the whole subject is encompassed with mystery, and affords material for
endless conjecture.
So also do the sacred stone circles, of which I have seen several to the
east of the Jordan. They are held in the greatest veneration by the
Arabs, who can give no rational explanation of the sacred character they
possess, except that they have been sacred from immemorial time. Here,
again, these may either have originally had a sepulchral character, or
they may have had reference to that peculiar and most ancient worship of
which the menhir or monolith was the emblem, for in some instances
menhirs are placed in certain fixed positions in regard to the circles,
or they may have had an astronomical significance. It is singular that
to this day the reverential attitude of the Arab is outside of the
circle with his face to the rising sun, while in India the same circles
are to be found among the Khonds in connection with the worship of the
rising sun, the tallest member of the circle being towards the east.
The conclusions at which we may proximately arrive with reference to
these interesting monuments are—according to Captain Conder, to whose
researches I am indebted for many of the foregoing remarks—that the
menhir is the emblem of the earliest religious idea suggested by the
creative potency; that the circle may either have a sacred significance
connected therewith, or be a sepulchral enclosure; that the dolmen, when
free standing, is more likely to have been an altar than a tomb, but
when buried beneath a cairn it may have been sepulchral; that the cairn
is not always sepulchral, being sometimes a memorial heap; and that all
are relics of a long-buried past.