Not only in monasteries and hermits’ caves were these pictures painted. On the north side of the Kelt ravine (the traditional Brook Cherith) there is a ruined monastery of St. John of Choseboth. Here I copied many texts and pictures; and outside the gate there is a wall of rock eighty feet in length, once covered with very large figures, like those which I have seen on the outer walls of Italian churches. The weather had long since destroyed them, but at Mar Marrina, near Tripoli, I afterwards found another cliff cemented and painted in like style. In this case the Greeks had come after the Latins, and instead of scraping off the old work, had begun to paint over it huge figures of the throned Christ and of the Mother of God, beneath which--as though on a palimpsest--I was able to copy a set of pictures representing the miracles performed by some Latin saint or abbot.[33]
Such are the remains preserved by the dryness of the desert air in the vicinity of Jericho. We must now cross to the west side of the watershed, where the country presents a very different aspect. Looking down from the heights of the Judean mountains, you see beneath a strip of low hills, covered in some places with brushwood, but full of villages, and with olive yards along the valley courses and round the stone or mud houses of the hamlets, so many of which preserve the old names of the Book of Joshua. Beyond these foot-hills is the broad plain, here and there rising into sandy downs, but, as a rule, brown in autumn with rich ploughlands, and yellow in summer with ripening grain. In spring the delicate tinge of green, the wide stretches of pink flush from the phlox blossoms, and the great variety of flowers and flowering shrubs, present a strong contrast to the grimness of the desert.
The Shephelah or foot-hills form a district full of interesting sites, and of ruins from the twelfth century A.D. back to the times of Hebrew dominion. Here our discoveries were numerous and important, but I will only refer to two periods of special interest--the time of the Jewish revolt under Judas Maccabæus, and the time of the first establishment of the Crusading kingdom in Jerusalem.
The history of the heroic brothers who recovered the religious freedom of the Jews by revolting from the Greek kings of Antioch in the second century B.C., is as easy to follow in detail on the ground as is that of David’s wanderings. I have already devoted a short volume to the subject,[34] and have tried to show how the attacks on Jerusalem were made successively by the Greek armies along the roads from the north-west, the west, and the south; how Judas met the foe on each occasion at the top of the narrow passes; how he hurled them back, as Joshua did the Canaanites on the same battle-fields; and how not even the elephants dismayed him. The native town of Judas, Modin--now called Medyeh--is a little village in the foot-hills, where, however, the reported tomb of the Maccabee and his family turned out to be merely a Byzantine monument. The scene of the death of Judas, while he was defending a fourth mountain pass leading from Shechem to Jerusalem, was not known; but we have, I think, been able to identify this important battle-field, where for a time the hopes of the national party seemed for ever to have been crushed.