To the south of the Valley of Hinnom is the hill, called by the Christians the Hill of Evil Counsel, because of a legend, that in a village on its western side, all trace of which has now disappeared, was a house belonging to Caiaphas; where the Priests and Pharisees assembled to compass the capture and death of Christ. Pompeius encamped upon its summit after he had taken Jerusalem[731]. The Arabs call it _Jebel el-Kubur_ (Mount of the Tombs); a most appropriate name, as it is in reality one great necropolis; now, however, inhabited by many peasants of Siloam, who have housed themselves and their crops in some of the sepulchral chambers, and converted others into cisterns. We will visit all the more interesting objects which we meet as we ascend from the Well of Job. At the bottom of a narrow trench, sloping steeply downwards, is a frontispiece[732], decorated with a triangular pediment, with a trefoil as finial, above a small doorway. On each side of this is a pilaster; these are still visible, though partly covered with soil. The interior[733] has this peculiarity, that the arches forming the roofs of the sepulchral niches are not very nearly semicircular, but extremely depressed; and a trough-shaped cavity or sarcophagus takes the place of the shelf for the corpse; an arrangement which does not occur in the tombs on the north of the city, or in the Kidron Valley. While I was engaged in making my Plan, I found a great number of bones in the interior; and in the chamber furthest to the east four perfect skeletons, which I discovered must have been placed there a few months before. I consider these tombs, as well as the others so common in the vicinity, to be more recent than those which are found elsewhere in the neighbourhood of the city; certainly they did not exist in the time of the Jewish kings, when Tophet was considered an accursed place. I think that they were excavated during the Asmonæan period, as the prejudice against the site might by that time have diminished. The simple but careful ornamentation of these tombs, the whiteness of the surface, and the absence of certain marks on the stone, characteristic of the instruments of the earlier period, all lead me to the same conclusion.