A peculiar civilisation was developed from the mixture of national and Greek elements in these regions during the five hundred years between Trajan and Mohammed. A fuller picture of it has been preserved to us than of other forms of the ancient world, inasmuch as the structures of Petra, in great part worked out of the rock, and the buildings in the Haurân, executed entirely of stone owing to the want of wood, comparatively little injured by the sway of the Bedouins which was here again installed with Islam in its old misrule, are still to a considerable degree extant to the present day, and throw a clear light on the artistic skill and the manner of life of those centuries. The above-mentioned temple of Baalsamin at Canatha, certainly built under Herod, shows in its original portions a complete diversity from Greek architecture and in the structural plan remarkable analogies with the temple-building of the same king in Jerusalem, while the pictorial representations shunned in the latter are by no means wanting here. A similar state of things has been observed in the monuments found at Petra. Afterwards further steps were taken. If under the Jewish and the Nabataean rulers culture freed itself but slowly from the influences of the East, a new time seems to have begun here with the transfer of the legion to Bostra. “Building,” says an excellent French observer, Melchior de Vogué, “obtained thereby an impetus which was not again arrested. Everywhere rose houses, palaces, baths, temples, theatres, aqueducts, triumphal arches; towns sprang from the ground within a few years with the regular construction and the symmetrically disposed colonnades which mark towns without a past, and which are as it were the inevitable uniform for this part of Syria during the imperial period.” The eastern and southern slope of the Haurân shows nearly three hundred such desolated towns and villages, while there only five new townships now exist; several of the former, _e.g._ Bûsân, number as many as 800 houses of one to two stories, built throughout of basalt, with well-jointed walls of square blocks without cement, with doors mostly ornamented and often provided with inscriptions, the flat roof formed of stone-rafters, which are supported by stone arches and made rain-proof above by a layer of cement. The town-wall is usually formed only by the backs of the houses joined together, and is protected by numerous towers. The poor attempts at re-colonising of recent times find the houses habitable; there is wanting only the diligent hand of man, or rather the strong arm that protects it. In front of the gates lie the cisterns, often subterranean, or provided with an artificial stone roof, many of which are still at the present day, when this deserted seat of towns has become pasturage, kept up by the Bedouins in order to water their flocks from them in summer. The style of building and the practice of art have doubtless preserved some remains of the