PALESTINE EXPLORATION.* DE. Buss does not profess to give the

results of the explora- tion of Palestine. He uses the word "exploration" in its proper sense, and tells us, not what explorers have done, though this could not, of course, be wholly excluded, but how they have set about doing it. The first explorer comes before us in the pages of an Egyptian romance. Sinuhit (or Sinahe), a son of Amenemhet I., flies from the hostility of his father's successor, and finds a refuge in Southern Syria. The man and his adventures are imaginary, but the things described are real. We see a country in the early stage of civilisation. Sinuhit enjoys a rough plenty, with interludes of sport and fighting, but is glad to come back in his old age to the luxuries of Egypt. The next " explorer " is some five centuries later (1966-1493 B.C.) He is the conqueror Thothmes III., and records more than a hundred towns, Megiddo among them, which he has captured. Somewhat later in the fifteenth century come the Tell-el-Amarna tablets, "Foreign Office" documents as we may call them, of the third and fourth Amenhoteps. Dr. Bliss had the good fortune to find one

• The Development of Palestine Exploration. By Frederick Jones BEM, Ph.D. London : fodder and Stoughton. [65.3

of these letters. "It served," he tells us, "as an inspiration in all my later excavations."

Some two centuries later, in the reign of Rameses IL, comes a record of Palestinian travel, and, after a similar interval, the narrative, unhappily imperfect, of a business journey, probably the purchase of timber from Lebanon. Later on exploration is represented by a succession of writers, some of them travellers, such as Herodotus, some stay-at home literati, such as the elder Pliny. This epoch, " The Dawn of Exploration," covering more than two thousand years, is connected with the

next, " The Age of Pilgrimage," by the Babylonian and the Palestinian Talmuds. The object sought by the Pilgrims

was, of course, edification rather than knowledge. First among them, in the earlier half of the fourth century of our era, comes the Bordeaux Pilgrim. He tells us some- thing, quite unintentionally of course, but what he does not say is at least as important as what be does. "Apart from the topographical allusions, the chief interest of the account lies for the critics in the absence of reference to minor Christian traditions and relics with which the writings of the sixth and all succeeding centuries are so overladen." In the second half of the same century came Paula, the friend of Jerome, and St. Silvia of Aquitaine. St. Silvia's sojourn in the country lasted for three years, but only a fragment of her narrative has been preserved. We have from her pen a remarkable narrative of Holy Week at Jerusalem, but her description of the city itself has perished. Some thirty years later we have the Onontasticon of Eusebius, as edited and completed by Jerome. Something like a blank follows till we reach the time of Justinian. To this period belongs, among other documents, the Itinerary of Antoninus Martyr of Placentia, who may be said to touch the lowest point of devout fatuity. He saw, he tells us, the book from which Christ learnt the alphabet, and His carpenter's bench. Elsewhere he adored the pail and basket of the Virgin-Mother, but be confuses Caesarea Philippi with Caesarea on the coast, and affirms that nothing will float on the waters of the Dead Sea. After the Pilgrims come the Crusaders. The century during which Palestine was open without hindrance to Christian travellers does not give us as many records of exploration as we might expect. Dr. Bliss writes :—

"Fsom the Moslem conquest in 636 to the present day no period has presented a more tempting chance to the Christian geographer and archaeologist. All Palestine, east and west, called to him, but he did not answer the cry, for the simple reason that he was not yet born. Inspired by the Crusading spirit, Europe had shaken off some of its lethargy, but this still clogged pure intellectual effort. The writers of this century confine them- selves, as a rule, to a description of the Holy Places which they have venerated—Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Shechem, Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, with a few intermediate points along the routes— and to a brief catalogue of other places not visited by them, or else compile a sort of impersonal guide-book, containing, indeed, more names than the personal itineraries, but, like most of these, lacking a firm grasp of broad geographical outlines. The earliest known mediaeval map of Palestine was prepared by Burchard of Mt. Zion, who wrote in 1283, almost a century after the loss of Jerusalem, only nine years before the final expulsion of the Franks, and thus at a time when identification of sites by personal investigation had become a matter of great difficulty."

When Jerusalem was lost to Christendom, the interest in it seems to have grown keener. The Dominican monk who is known as Burchard of Mount Zion shows more of the archaeological—we might even say the scientific—spirit than any of his predecessors, and Burchard wrote about forty years after the final capture of Jerusalem (1244), when the Frankish

possessions had been reduced to a few towns upon the coast. (Acre, their last stronghold, fell in 1291.) Some half-century after we have an interesting study of the country from the pen of a Jewish traveller, Esthori B. Mose Ha-Parchi, who spent seven years in a systematic exploration, with results which Dr. Bliss considers to be " a great advance upon con- temporary Christian writers." Dr. Bliss entitles his fourth chapter "From Fabri to Robinson." In Fabri, who was of the same Dominican Order which claims his predecessor Burchard, Dr. Bliss sees the beginning of the "tran- sition from mediaeval to modern methods." Fabri, who was gifted with no little sense of humour—he says that he and his party were worse off than the man who "fell among thieves," because they brought their thieves with them—had the open mind which often goes with this gift. Reviewing his first visit, to Palestine, he peroaived that he had "run about among the Holy Places without understanding,

or feeling what they were," and resolved to prepare himself for doing something. He spent, accordingly, a year in studying the literature of the subject, and when the oppor- tunity came—he went as chaplain to a party of four Venetian nobles—he was prepared to take advantage of it. (It is in- teresting to be told that the " Cook " of the period charged two hundred ducats-294—for the tour, extra excursions not being included.) Fabri is the earliest writer to discuss critically the question of the Sacred Places. He examined as minutely as he could the Holy Sepulchre. The site it did not occur to him to doubt. What he busied himself over was the question,—Is this the original tomb? and his conclusions were: " It is apparent to me that the Lord's Sepulchre had once been destroyed, but never completely rooted up, and that it has stood for more

than 200 years as it appears to-day." He wrote, it should be said, in 1483. Passing over more than three centuries, and in them a number of interesting details, we come to the famous Burckhardt. His career was cut short by death, but he had done much, his greatest achievement being the discovery of Petra. After Burckhardt, who died in 1817, comes Edward Robinson, who first set foot in the Holy Land in 1837. To him Dr. Bliss very properly devotes a whole chapter, for he practically founded the school of Palestinian exploration, as it is now understood. He had his defects and his limitations. His preparation for his task was not equally complete in all points. That, however, may probably be said

of all the race of explorers, until the ideal man, not yet found Dr. Bliss thinks, shall appear upon the scene. But he had a more serious fault. We will leave Dr. Bliss to characterise it:

." We have noticed the scepticism regarding ecclesiastical tradition controlling Robinson's researches ; a scepticism not negative but brilliantly positive ; a scepticism not barren but productive of a rich harvest ; destruction followed, when possible, by reconstruction. But he had the defect of his quality. His methods of destruction are sometimes open to criticism. Hearty recognition we have already given to his admirable fusion of accurate observation, clear judgment, and downright common- sense ; we are bound now to take count of his lapses from a calm and scientific temper. Spots held in peculiar veneration by the Roman Catholic and Eastern clergy seem to have been thereby rendered obnoxious to him, and were visited with obvious reluc- tance. Thus, the day after his first arrival in Jerusalem, in 1838, he witnessed part of the Easter ceremonies in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but,' he says, ' to be in the ancient City of the Most High and to see these venerated places and the very name of our Holy Religion profaned by lying and idle mummeries, while the proud Mussulmen looked on with haughty scorn—all this excited in my mind a feeling too painful to be borne, and I never visited the place again.' Here speaks the Puritan, not the Explorer. Robinson's personal attitude toward ritual was his own affair, but to have let this stand in the way of his thorough examination of one of the most interesting buildings in the world was not worthy of one who crawled on hands and knees through the windings of the Siloam Tunnel."

For the work done by Robinson's successors we must refer our readers to Dr. Bliss's volume. He deals with the subject with admirable discretion. Nor can we do more than mention the chapter, rich though it is in suggestion.

with which he concludes, "The Exploration of the Future." For one province of this work he demands speedy atten-

tion, "the religious rites, the social manners and customs of the modern inhabitants of the land." Something has been accomplished in this direction, as in a book noticed in the Spectator of February 10th—Village Life in Palestine—but much remains to be done, and this must be done at once, for Western civilisation is passing over the land, and will most certainly sweep away the past more completely than any one of the invaders who have preceded it.