Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and AdventureConder, C. R. (Claude Reignier)
History
Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure
Conder, C. R. (Claude Reignier)
Palestine -- Description and travel
Jerome tells us that there were in his day two Jerichos, and in 333 A.D.
the anonymous pilgrim of Bordeaux found a town at the foot of the pass.
Here also we have remains of a bridge which has the _opus reticulatum_
of Roman masonry, and this, with a few strewn fragments and with two
great mounds of sun-dried brick, seems all that is left of the second
Jericho. The Byzantine, or fourth-century town, mentioned by Jerome as
the second Jericho, is no doubt represented by the foundations and
fragments of cornice and capital, over which the rider stumbles among
the thorn-groves east of the ’Ain es Sultân.
By 700 A.D. Jericho had again disappeared, and thus, in the twelfth
century, we find the site once more moved. The modern Erîha then springs
into existence near a square tower, such as the Crusaders erected along
their pilgrim-roads, and a tradition of the “Garden of Abraham” comes
into existence as early as the time of Sæwulf (1102 A.D.). In the
fourteenth century Sir John Maundeville finds Jericho a little village,
and Abraham’s Garden is then stated to be at the foot of the
Quarantania. Fetellus makes the distance between Jericho and the latter
mountain two miles, and thus it is pretty clear that the modern Erîha
represents the site which was created in the Crusading period.
A question of even greater interest is that of the long-sought site of
Gilgal, and our inquiries were rewarded with success. Robinson had heard
the name Jiljûlieh, but had not been able to fix the site. A German
traveller (Herr Schokke), in 1865, had been more fortunate, and was
shown the place at a mound about a mile east of Erîha. It was important
to ascertain the reliability of this discovery, and I succeeded in
recovering the spot visited by this traveller, by means of the
compass-bearing which he had been wise enough to take. I found three
persons who knew the site by the name Jiljûlieh, and one of them
conducted me to ruins to which a curious tradition applies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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