The City of Jerusalem
9781465679383
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I first set eyes on Jerusalem one summer morning in 1872. The view—a mile away—of the long grey wall, the cypress trees of the Armenian garden, and the single minaret at the west gate, was not then obstructed by the row of Jewish cottages since built. The population was only about a third of what it now is. The railway station was not thought of, and only a few villas outside the gate existed, while the suburbs to north and south had not grown up, and Olivet was not covered with modern buildings. I passed two winters (1873–5) in the city, the second in a house in the Jews’ quarter, and later on (1881–2) a third winter at the hotel; and during these visits my time was mainly occupied in wandering among the less-known corners of the town. It was a period very favourable for exploration. The survey by Sir Charles Wilson, the researches of de Vogüé, and the wonderful excavations of Sir Charles Warren, were then recent. The German Emperor, William I., had just ordered the clearing out of the eastern half of the great square of St. John’s Hospital, having been given by the Sultan the site of Charlemagne’s hospice beside the Church of St. Mary Latin. In 1874 Mr. Henry Maudeslay was exploring the ancient scarps at the south-west corner of the Hebrew city; and, by the Sultan’s order, the Dome of the Rock—deconsecrated for a time—was being repaired, while other excavations were in progress outside the city on the north. I was thus able to walk in my socks all over the surface of the sacred Ṣakhrah “rock,” and to ascend the scaffolding to the dome above, in order to examine the ancient mosaics of our seventh century, as well as those on the outside, where the old arcaded battlement of the ninth century was just laid bare. I penetrated, by the old rock-cut aqueduct at the north-west corner of the Ḥaram, to the Herodian wall, and discovered the buttresses of the Temple rampart still standing, and just like those at Hebron. In the Jews’ quarter I found the old hospice of the Teutonic Order, and the chapel of the Holy Ghost. In 1881 I crawled through the Siloam tunnel with two comrades, in danger of our lives, to find the point where the two parties of Hezekiah’s workmen heard each other calling, and joined their work by a cross cut east and west. These were but a few additions to the work of my predecessors, and since 1882 many other valuable discoveries have been made by Mr. Bliss, Mr. Stewart Macalister, and other explorers, which will be described in due course. We no longer depend on the writings of Josephus and Tacitus, or on the confused accounts of mediæval pilgrims. Our ideas are founded on existing remains. We have Hezekiah’s own inscription at Siloam; the text (found by M. Clermont-Ganneau) which forbade Gentiles to enter the court of Herod’s Temple; the red paint instructions which his master-masons scrawled on the foundations of the mighty ramparts; the votive text to Serapis set up later by Roman soldiers; the Greek inscriptions of Byzantine monks in tombs on the south side of the Hinnom Valley, and, yet earlier, those on the ossuaries, which pious Jews and Jewish Christians used in gathering the bones of their fathers for burial in the old tombs east and north of the Holy City. We have Armenian and Georgian mosaic texts, and Gothic tombstones of Crusaders. Finally, we have the great Kufic, Karmathian, and Arabic texts of the Khalîfahs and Sulṭâns of Islâm, who founded or repaired the beautiful buildings in the Ḥaram.
