This name Teiâsîr I suppose to be Tirzah. It contains the exact letters of the Hebrew word, though the two last radicals are interchanged in position, a kind of change not unusual among the peasantry. The beauty of the position and the richness of the plain on the west, the ancient remains, and the old main road to the place from Shechem, seem to agree well with the idea of its having once been a capital; and if I am right in the suggestion, then the old sepulchres are probably, some of them, those of the early kings of Israel before the royal family began to be buried in Samaria.
Our new camp was fixed at Jenîn, the ancient Engannim or "Spring of Gardens,â at the southern extremity of the Great Plain, a border city of Galilee according to Josephus, now a picturesque town of three thousand inhabitants, with a bazaar and a mosque, surrounded by groves of olives, through which a little stream finds its way in spring. Our camp was west of the place, and looked out on the white mosque of 'Azz ed Dîn with its minaret, the great threshing-floor with its heaps of yellow grain, the beautiful gardens of palms, oranges, and tamarisks set in cactus hedges, while behind, on the east, was the stony range of Gilboa, on the north the brown plain, the blue Nazareth hills, the volcanic cone of Jebel D[)u]hy, and the shoulder of Carmel towards the west.
The Great Plain extends northwards fourteen miles from Jenîn, to Junjâr at the foot of the Nazareth chain, whilst from Jezreel on the east, to Legio on the west, is about nine miles. The elevation is about 200 to 250 feet above the sea, and a Y-shaped double range of hills bounds it east and west, with an average elevation of 1500 feet above the plain. On the north-east are the two detached blocks of Neby D[)u]hy and Tabor, and on the north-west a narrow gorge is formed by the river Kishon, which springs from beneath Tabor and collecting the whole drainage of this large basin, passes from the Great Plain to that of Acre. On the east of the plain the broad valley of Jezreel gradually slopes down towards Jordan, and Jezreel itself (the modern Zer'in) stands on the side of Gilboa above it. On the west are the scarcely less famous sites of Legio, Taanach, and Jokneam, while the picturesque conical hill of D[)u]hy, just north of the Jezreel valley, has Shunem on its south slope, and Nain and Endor on the north. Thus seven places of interest lie at the foot of the hills east and west, but no important town was ever situate in the plain itself--a flat expanse of arable land, the loose basaltic soil of which is extremely fertile.