This may have been the case in respect of the earlier synagogues, long anterior to the time of Christ, the traces of which have been lost, but in the case of eleven which have been discovered by the officers of the Palestine Exploration Fund, since the above was written, no such rules have been adhered to. These all date either from the time of Christ, or shortly before it, to three centuries after it. We know they were synagogues, and can approximately calculate their dates, from the Hebrew inscriptions found on some of them, and from the emblems with which they were ornamented, such as the pot of manna, the seven-branched candlestick, and other purely Jewish devices. In the cases of these synagogues, many of which I have seen, the builders have by no means selected the most prominent positions; the existing remains have, with two exceptions—at Irbid and at ed-Dikkeh, where the ground would not admit of such an arrangement—their doors on the southern side, so that every Jew entering would have to turn his back on Jerusalem. The ark, if there was one in these synagogues, would necessarily, in that case, be placed at the northern end, and the worshippers would therefore have to pray with their backs to Jerusalem. We know, besides, how abhorrent to the Jews were the figures of animals, and the popular impression has been that none such were permitted to decorate their synagogues; yet in these synagogues we find them prominently carved in stone in six out of the eleven. The carved figure I found at ed-Dikkeh makes a seventh, and they probably existed in the others and in greater quantities than those already noted, but have been destroyed by the Mohammedans as contrary to their religion. As may be supposed, as they were all built at nearly the same period, there is a great similarity in the architecture of the synagogues recently discovered. It is of an extremely florid and somewhat debased Roman type. In all of them the same class of mouldings is observable. There is a great resemblance in the niches and cornices, while the capitals show some variation, being Corinthian, Doric, and Ionic. There is also a great similarity in the ground plan and in the position of the columns. In the case of a Roman temple these are all in colonnades outside the building, in cases of synagogues they are all within it. There should be no possibility, therefore, of confusing a synagogue with a Roman temple, even though it abounds with Roman architecture; but it is not always so easy to distinguish it from an early Christian church, or basilica, where the columns were also inside. The reason that the architecture of these latter synagogues was so purely Roman in character is to be found in the conditions under which they were built. Shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the Jewish Sanhedrim was established at Tiberias, under a patriarchate whose authority was recognized by the foreign communities at Rome and in Asia Minor, and