The oldest explorer of Palestine--if we do not reckon Abraham--was the brave King Thothmes III., who marched his armies throughout its whole length on his way towards Euphrates. Many are the pilgrims and conquerors who have followed the same great highways along which he went. When, in the early Christian ages, the land became sacred to Europe, the patient pilgrims of Italy, and even of Gaul, journeyed along the shores of Asia Minor, and sometimes were able to reach the Holy City, and to bring back to their homes some account of the country; while in later ages the pilgrims came not singly, but in hosts continually increasing, and finally as crusaders, colonists, and traders. [Illustration: PALESTINE AND PART OF SYRIA ACCORDING TO PTOLEMY, _c._ 100 A.D.] The literature of Palestine exploration begins, therefore, with the establishment of Christianity. Before that date we have very little outside the Bible except in the works of Josephus, whose descriptions, though at times unreliable as regards measurement, are invaluable as the accounts of an eye-witness of the state of the country before the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. We have scattered notes in the Talmud, in Pliny, in Ptolemy,[1] in Strabo, and in other classic works, which have been collected by the care of Reland and of later writers; but it was only when the Holy Land became a land of pilgrimage for Christians that itineraries and detailed accounts of its towns and holy places began to be penned. The Bordeaux pilgrim[2] actually visited Jerusalem while Constantine’s basilica was being built over the supposed site of the Holy Sepulchre, and in Palestine his brief record of stations and distances is expanded into notes on the places which he found most revered by Syrian Christians. In the same reign, Eusebius, the historian of the Church, constructed an Onomasticon, which answered roughly to the modern geographical gazetteer. His aim--and that of Jerome, who rather later rendered this work from Greek into Latin, adding notes of his own--was to identify as far as possible the places mentioned in the Old and New Testaments with places existing in the country as known to themselves. This work is both scholarly and honest in intention, but the traditions on which Eusebius and Jerome relied have not in all cases proved to be reconcilable with the Biblical requirements as studied by modern science. The Onomasticon is, however, of great importance as regards the topography of Palestine in the fourth century, and has often led to the recovery of yet more ancient sites, which might otherwise have been lost. Jerome had an intimate personal knowledge, not only of the country round Jerusalem and Bethlehem, where he lived so long, but also of the whole of Western Palestine. Places east of Jordan are noticed in the Onomasticon, but that region was less perfectly known to the Christian co-authors of this work. In the fourth century the Roman roads were