Part 3 (2/2)

Hebrew inscriptions of an early date have long been sought for in vain. We knew of one or two inscribed fragments from the neighbourhood of the Pool of Siloam at Jerusalem, and of a few seals which might be referred to the period before the Babylonish Captivity; but, unfortunately, none of these could be a.s.signed to a definite date, and even the conclusion that some of them were pre-exilic was after all little more than a guess. The seals are usually distinguished by the absence of any symbols or other devices, as well as by a horizontal line drawn across the middle, which divides the inscription into two halves. The proper names also which occur on them are, in the majority of cases, compounded with the sacred name Yahveh.

Several of these seals have been found in Babylonia and Mesopotamia, and may therefore be regarded as memorials of the Jewish exile. But the legends they bear are always short, and consist of little else than proper names; and as their date was uncertain, it was impossible to draw any solid inferences from them as to the character of the writing employed in Judah or Israel before the age of Nebuchadnezzar.

It is quite otherwise now. An inscription of some length has been discovered in Jerusalem itself, which is certainly as old as the time of Isaiah, and may be older still. In the summer of 1880, one of the native pupils of Mr. Schick, a German architect long settled in Jerusalem, was playing with some other lads in the so-called Pool of Siloam, and while wading up a channel cut in the rock which leads into the Pool, slipped and fell into the water. On rising to the surface, he noticed what looked like letters on the rock which formed the southern wall of the channel. He told Mr. Schick of what he had seen; and the latter, on visiting the spot, found that an ancient inscription, concealed for the most part by the water, actually existed there.

The Pool is of comparatively modern construction, but it encloses the remains of a much older reservoir, which, like the modern one, was supplied with water through a tunnel excavated in the rock. This tunnel communicates with the so-called Spring of the Virgin, the only natural spring of water in or near Jerusalem. It rises below the walls of the city, on the western bank of the valley of the Kidron; and the tunnel through which its waters are conveyed is consequently cut through the ridge, that forms the southern part of the Temple Hill. The Pool of Siloam lies on the opposite side of this ridge, at the mouth of the valley called that of the Cheesemakers (Tyropon) in the time of Josephus, but which is now filled up with rubbish, and in large part built over. According to Lieutenant Conder's measurements, the length of the tunnel is 1,708 yards; it does not, however, run in a straight line, and towards the centre there are two _culs de sac_, of which the inscription now offers an explanation.

At the entrance on the western or Siloam side its height is about sixteen feet; but the roof grows gradually lower, until in one place it is not quite two feet above the floor of the pa.s.sage.

[Ill.u.s.tration.]

The Siloam Inscription (tracing from a squeeze, taken 15th July, 1881, by Lieuts. Conder and Mantell, R. E.).

The inscription occupies the under part of an artificial tablet in the wall of rock, about nineteen feet from where the conduit opens out upon the Pool of Siloam, and on the right-hand side of one who enters it. After lowering the level of the water, Mr. Schick endeavoured to take a copy of it; but as not only the letters of the text, but every flaw in the rock were filled with a deposit of lime left by the water, all he could send to Europe was a collection of unmeaning scrawls. Besides the difficulty of distinguis.h.i.+ng the letters, it was also necessary to sit in the mud and water, and to work by the dim light of a candle, as the place where the inscription is engraved is perfectly dark. All this rendered it impossible for anyone not acquainted with Phnician palaeography to make an accurate transcript. The first intelligible copy accordingly was made by Professor Sayce after several hours of careful study; but this too contained several doubtful characters, the real forms of which could only be determined by the removal of the calcareous matter with which they were coated. In March, 1881, six weeks after Sayce's visit, Dr. Guthe arrived in Jerusalem, and after making a more complete facsimile of the inscription than had previously been possible, removed the deposit of lime by means of an acid, and so revealed the original appearance of the tablet. Letters which had previously been concealed now became visible, and the exact shapes of them all could be observed. First a cast, and then squeezes of the text were taken; and the scholars of Europe had at last in their hands an exact copy of the old text.

The inscription consists of six lines, but several of the letters composing it have unfortunately been destroyed by the wearing away of the rock. The translation of it is as follows:-

1. ”(Behold) the excavation! Now this is the history of the excavation.

While the excavators were still lifting up the pick, each towards his neighbour, and while there were yet three cubits to (excavate, there was heard) the voice of one man calling to his neighbour, for there was an excess in the rock on the right hand (and on the left). And after that on the day of excavating the excavators had struck pick against pick, one against the other, the waters flowed from the spring to the Pool for a distance of 1,200 cubits. And (part) of a cubit was the height of the rock over the head of the excavators.”

The language of the inscription is the purest Biblical Hebrew. There is only one word in it-that rendered ”excess”-which is new, and consequently of doubtful signification. We learn from it that the engineering skill of the day was by no means despicable. The conduit was excavated in the same fas.h.i.+on as the Mont Cenis tunnel of our own time, by beginning the work simultaneously at the two ends; and, in spite of its windings, the workmen almost succeeded in meeting in the middle. They approached, indeed, so nearly to one another, that the noise made by the one party in hewing the rock was heard by the other, and the small piece of rock which intervened between them was accordingly pierced. This accounts for the two _culs de sac_ now found in the centre of the channel; they represent the extreme points reached by the two bands of excavators before they had discovered that, instead of meeting, they were pa.s.sing by one another.

It is most unfortunate that the inscription contains no indication of date; but the forms of the letters used in it show that it cannot be very much later in age than the Moabite Stone. Indeed, some of the letters exhibit older forms than those of the Moabite Stone; but this may be explained by the supposition that the scribes of Jerusalem were more conservative, more disposed to retain old forms, than the scribes of king Mesha. The prevalent opinion of scholars is that the tunnel and consequently the inscription in it were executed in the reign of Hezekiah.

According to the Chronicler (2 Chr. x.x.xii. 30), Hezekiah ”stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon, and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David,” and we read in 2 Kings xx. 20, that ”he made a pool and a conduit, and brought water into the city.” The object of the laborious undertaking is very plain. The Virgin's Spring, the only natural source near Jerusalem, lay outside the walls, and in time of war might easily pa.s.s into the hands of the enemy. The Jewish kings, therefore, did their best to seal up this spring, which must be the Chronicler's ”upper water-course of Gihon,” and to bring its waters by subterranean pa.s.sages inside the city walls. Besides the tunnel which contains the inscription another tunnel has been discovered, which also communicates with the Virgin's Spring. But it is tempting to suppose that the most important of these-the tunnel which contains the inscription-must be the one which Hezekiah made.

The supposition, however, is rendered uncertain by a statement of Isaiah (viii. 6). While Ahaz, the father of Hezekiah, was still reigning, Isaiah uttered a prophecy in which he made allusion to ”the waters of s.h.i.+loah that go softly.” Now this can hardly refer to anything else than the gently flowing stream which still runs through the tunnel of Siloam. In this case the conduit would have been in existence before the time of Hezekiah; and, since we know of no earlier period when a great engineering work of the kind could have been executed until we go back to the reign of Solomon, it is possible that the inscription may actually be of this ancient date. The inference is supported by the name s.h.i.+loah, which probably means ”the tunnel,” and would have been given to the locality in consequence of the conduit which here pierced the rock. It was not likely that when David and Solomon were fortifying Jerusalem, and employing Phnician architects upon great public buildings there, they would have allowed the city to depend wholly upon rain cisterns for its water supply.

Since the inscription calls the Pool of Siloam simply ”the Pool,” we may perhaps infer that no other reservoir of the kind was in existence at the time; and yet in the age of Isaiah, as we learn from Isa. xxii. 9, 11, there was not only ”a lower pool,” in contradistinction to ”an upper one,”

but also ”an old pool,” in contradistinction to a new one. As Dr. Guthe's excavations have laid bare the remains of four such pools in the neighbourhood of that of Siloam, there is no difficulty in finding places for all these reservoirs. But they could hardly have existed when the Pool of Siloam was still known as simply ”the Pool,” nor could the name of s.h.i.+loah have well been given to the locality if another tunnel, observed by Sir Charles Warren on the eastern side of the Temple Hill, had been already excavated. This second tunnel starts, like the Siloam one, from the Virgin's Spring, and was designed to bring the water of the spring within the walls of the city. A shaft is cut for seventy feet into the hill, where it meets another perpendicular shaft, which rises for a height of fifty feet, and then meets a flight of steps, which lead into a broad pa.s.sage, ending in another flight of steps and a vaulted chamber. Niches for lamps were found here at intervals, intended to light the persons who went to draw the water by means of a bucket. As lamps of the Roman period were discovered in the chamber, the tunnel must have been known and used up to the time of the capture of Jerusalem by t.i.tus, and it is probably not older than the reign of Herod. In any case, the comparative excellence of its workmans.h.i.+p goes to show that it was made at a later date than the tunnel of Siloam.

Whatever doubts, however, may still hang over the date of the inscription, there can be no question that it has thrown most important light on the topography of Jerusalem in the period of the kings. It is now clear that the modern city occupies very little of the same ground as the ancient one; the latter stood entirely on the rising ground to the east of the Tyropon valley, the northern portion of which is at present occupied by the mosque of Omar, while the southern portion is uninhabited. The Tyropon valley itself must be the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, where the idolaters of Jerusalem burnt their children in the fire to Moloch. It must be in the southern cliff of this valley that the tombs of the kings are situated; the reason why they have never yet been found being that they are buried under the rubbish with which the valley is filled. Among the rubbish must be the remains of the city which was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, and whose ruins were flung into the gorge below. Between the higher part of the hill, now occupied by the mosque of Omar, and its lower uninhabited portion, Dr. Guthe has discovered traces of a valley which once ran into the valley of the Kidron at right angles to it, not far from the Virgin's Spring, and divided in old days the City of David from the rest of the town. Here, as well as in the now obliterated Valley of the Cheesemakers, there probably still lie the relics of the dynasty of David; but we shall only know the story they have to tell us when the spade of the excavator has come to continue the discoveries which the inscription of Siloam has begun.

CHAPTER V. THE EMPIRE OF THE HITt.i.tES.

_Discovery of traces of an ancient Hitt.i.te Empire.-Scripture references to the Hitt.i.tes.-Professor Sayce's discovery.-The inscriptions at Hamath.-The Hitt.i.te race.-Hitt.i.te art._

Five years ago there was no one who suspected that a great empire had once existed in Western Asia and contended on equal terms with both Egypt and a.s.syria, the founders of which were the little-noticed Hitt.i.tes of the Old Testament. Still less did any one dream that these same Hitt.i.tes had once carried their arms, their art, and their religion to the sh.o.r.es of the aeegean, and that the early civilisation of Greece and Europe was as much indebted to them as it was to the Phnicians.

The discovery was made in 1879. Recent exploration and excavation had shown that the primitive art and culture of Greece, as revealed, for example, by Dr. Schliemann's excavations at Mykenae, were influenced by a peculiar art and culture emanating from Asia Minor. Here, too, certain strange monuments had been discovered, which form a continuous chain from Lydia in the west to Kappadokia and Lykaonia in the east. The best known of these are certain rock sculptures found at Boghaz Keui and Eyuk, on the eastern side of the Halys, and two figures in relief in the Pa.s.s of Karabel, near Sardes, which the old Greek historian, Herodotus, had long ago supposed to be memorials of the Egyptian conqueror Sesostris, or Ramses II.

Meanwhile other discoveries were being made in lands more immediately connected with the Bible. Scholars had learned from the Egyptian inscriptions that before the days of the Exodus the Egyptian monarchs had been engaged in fierce struggles with the powerful nation of the Hitt.i.tes, whose two chief seats were at Kadesh on the Orontes and Carchemish on the Euphrates, and who were able to summon to their aid subject-allies not only from Palestine, but also far away from Lydia and the Troad, on the western coast of Asia Minor. Ramses II himself, the Pharaoh of the oppression, had been glad to make peace with his antagonists; and the treaty, which provided, among other things, for the amnesty of political offenders who had found a shelter during the war among one or other of the two combatants, was cemented by the marriage of the Egyptian king with the daughter of his rival. A century or two afterwards Tiglath-Pileser I of a.s.syria found his pa.s.sage across the Euphrates barred by the Hitt.i.tes of Carchemish and their Kolkhian mercenaries. From this time forward the Hitt.i.tes proved dangerous enemies to the a.s.syrian kings in their attempts to extend the empire towards the west, until at last in B.C. 717 Sargon succeeded in capturing their rich capital, Carchemish, and in making it the seat of an a.s.syrian satrap. Henceforth the Hitt.i.tes disappear from history.

But they had already left their mark on the pages of the Old Testament.

The Canaanite who had betrayed his fellow-citizens at Beth-el to the Israelites dared not entrust himself to his countrymen, but went away ”into the land of the Hitt.i.tes” (Judges i. 26). Solomon imported horses from Egypt, which he sold to the Syrians and the Hitt.i.tes (1 Kings x. 28, 29), and when G.o.d had sent a panic upon the camp of the Syrians before Jerusalem, they had imagined that ”the king of Israel had hired against them the kings of the Hitt.i.tes and the kings of the Egyptians” (2 Kings vii. 6). Kadesh itself, the southern Hitt.i.te capital, is mentioned in a pa.s.sage where the Hebrew text is unfortunately corrupt (2 Sam. xxiv. 6).

Here the Septuagint shows us that the officers sent by David to number the people, in skirting the northern frontier of his kingdom, came as far as ”Gilead and the land of the Hitt.i.tes of Kadesh.” In the extreme south of Palestine an offshoot of the race had been settled from an early period.

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