There were many Samaritans at Gaza in the seventh century. After the Muslim conquest, A.D. 634, the Samaritans of Gaza deposited their property with their high priest, and fled to the east. The five hundred Samaritans who had been captured at Shechem by Bazawash, governor of Demascus, _c._ A.D. 1137, were redeemed by a co-religionist of Acre. Many of these settled in Gaza. In A.D. 1674 the Samaritans living at Gaza addressed a letter to Robert Huntington, who was deeply interested in their religion and literature. Clermont-Ganneau reports the finding of a Samaritan liturgical inscription at Gaza, but does not produce it either in the original or in translation. Able also reports a fragment of a decalogue in the Samaritan script of the Mohammedan period. Among the _Gleanings from the Minute Books_ of the Jerusalem Literature Society, November 1849, Mr. E. T. Rogers remarks that the Samaritans are still quite a distinct set of people, as they were in the time of our Saviour. They make no proselytes; never intermarry with people of other sects, and are particularly clean as a people; none others are known than those now in Nablus. Their principal distinction in the oriental crowd is that they wear a crimson turban. When the Rev. Dr. E. H. Thomson visited Nablus, in May 1898, he asked after the fate of the Samaritan community that was still surviving in Gaza when Baron Sylvestre de Sacy, _c._ 1829, corresponded with the Samaritans of Nablus. He was informed that the community in Gaza had ceased to exist some sixty years before. Now, at all events, these one hundred and sixty Samaritans resident in Nablus are all that remain of the Samaritan race and creed. Mr. J. G. Pickard, writing from Gaza in _The Quarterly Statement_ P. E. F., July 1873, reports on the newly discovered Samaritan Stone of which the inscription is a passage in Deuteronomy iv. 29-31. It has been suggested that this stone belonged to a Samaritan synagogue in Gaza. The spot where the stone was discovered is about a mile and a half from the sea shore. CHAPTER VII SOME EARLY BISHOPS OF (I) GAZA, (II) MAYOUMAS (THE PORT OF GAZA) Palestina Prima--Cæsarea, _Metropolis_. _The Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_, p. 1631, mentions "Philemon (1) Bishop of Gaza; commemorated February 14 (Basil Menol)." _The Kalendar of the Byzantine Church_, on November 22, commemorates "Philemon, Apostle." The Jerusalem Archimandrite Meletius Metaxakis, (now Bishop of Kition, Cyprus), in an article on the Madaba Mosaic Map, _Nea Sion_, May and June 1907, p. 485, states that "according to _The Ecclesiastical Treatise about the Seventy Disciples of the Lord_, Philemon, the Apostle, to whom the Epistle of Paul is directed, became Bishop of Gaza."