“The convent of the Tôr (mountain) Sinai, and the church of the conference, the pious king Justianus (instead of Justinianus), of Greek confession, yearning after God, and hoping for the summons of his Lord, for a memorial of himself and his wife Theodora against the passing of time, that God may inherit the earth and what is upon it, for _he is the best of inheritors_. And the erection was ended after thirty years of his government. And he set over it a chief, named Dhulas. And this took place after Adam 6021, which agrees with the year 527 of the era of the Lord Christ.” The characters of the inscription certify, according to the information of the Consul, Dr. Wetzstein, who has kindly undertaken the copying and translation of the inscription, that they are not of a date previous to 550 of the Mahommedan era, which, therefore, brings us back to the time in which the Greek inscription was made. The passage of the Koran, mentioned already by Burckhardt, is in Surât, xxi., v. 18. In the same wall, but much higher up, over a far greater door, now bricked up, at a place behind which the kitchen is now lying, another great stone is let in, the ornament of which [Illustration] might lead to the supposition that there is another old inscription there. Unfortunately, it was impossible to have a ladder brought thither, to examine the stone more carefully. May a later traveller succeed in this! NOTE E. (Letter XXXIII. p. 370.) The history of the palm-wood of Pharan forms the centre-point of the history of the whole peninsula. The accounts of the Greeks and Romans give a new proof of this, though their geographical determinations have, for the most part, been incorrectly apprehended. Thus the Poseidion of Artemidorus, Diodorus, and Strabo, is generally put at the extremity of the peninsula now called Râs Mahommed, even by Gosselin, Letroune, and Groskura, who had certainly perceived the incorrect gloss of the manuscripts of Strabo (p. 776: τοῦ [Ἐλανίτου] μυχοῦ). As the Poseidion lay _within_ (ἐνδοτέρω) the Gulf of Suez, and as the _western_ coast of the peninsula is described, this altar of Poseidion necessarily lay either at Râs Abu Zelîmeh, the haven of Faran, or at Râs G’ehân, where there was a more southerly and shorter communication by Wadi Dhaghadeh with Wadi Firân. That the Palm-grove (Φοινικών) of that author is not to be found by Tôr, but in the Wadi Firân, has already been rightly seen by Tuch, (_Sinait. Inschr._, p. 35), although he still places the Poseidion at Râs Mahommed (p. 37). It was the Serb Bâl--the palm-grove of Baal--from which the mountain first obtained its name. It appears that at an earlier date the name of Faran was used with particular reference to the haven near Abu Zelîmeh, and a Pharanitic colony at the place of ancient Elim, in the neighbourhood of the present Gebel Hammân Faraûn, still called Farân by the Arabic historians; while the grove itself was yet called Serb Bâl by the inhabitants.