Page:Buried cities and Bible countries (1891).djvu/166

 rising ground—a mud hamlet, with gardens fenced with prickly pears. Conder says there is nothing ancient here.

(Site of Gath?) (By favour of the Palestine Exploration Fund.)

At Azotus, or Ashdod, one of the Philistine cities, is a large mound, with columns cropping up out of the ground on the outskirts of it. Mr Trelawney Saunders, the geographer, has described the site in his "Introduction to the Survey of Western Palestine." Ashdod, on a hillock (alt. 140 feet), at the western end of the plain of Zeita, is now separated from all that remains of its port, by sand-downs 3 miles in breadth. The site is occupied by the present village of Esdud, with eighteen hundred people, but the remains of this primeval city, once so strong and mighty, are so few and insignificant that one is tempted to suppose the greater part of the city may be buried beneath the sands. If so, they may be in a superior state of preservation, and would perhaps repay for digging out.

Gath, the birth-place of Goliath, has long been a lost city, but is now reasonably identified with Tell es Sufi at