Page:Buried cities and Bible countries (1891).djvu/271

 stones with the Phœnician masons' marks upon them may be the very foundation stones of the palace. The palace was a great work, and occupied thirteen years in building. It was necessary to build up at this corner, but as soon as a level was reached that permitted the work to be carried through from east to west, the six-feet course was laid as the true base for the more splendid superstructure. This six-feet course extends for 600 feet westward from the south-east angle, and gives us the limit in that direction. Northward we are limited by the courts of the temple to 300 feet. This, then, is where Sir Charles Warren places Solomon's palace, and these are the dimensions he assigns to it. Mr James Fergusson had already been led, from architectural reasons, to consider it an oblong of 550 feet by 300. The level of the six-feet course is 60 feet below the summit of the mountain. A patient examination of the wall led Warren to the conclusion that all below this great course is old work, and that the walls of the Haram generally correspond to the description of Josephus, in whose day the great wall of Solomon still existed.

The Temple and the palace being thus located, there is left, beyond the west end of the palace, a plot of ground, 300 feet square, not enclosed at the time we are speaking of, although at the present day it forms the south-western corner of the Sanctuary and has the mosque El Aksa covering it. But the great depression of the Tyropœonan] Valley falls just there, and it would not be raised and enclosed until a late day. Warren says, in the "Recovery of Jerusalem": "Our researches show that the portion of the wall to the west of the Double Gate is of a different construction to, and more recent than that to the east. This is a matter of very great importance, and, combined with other results, appears to show the impossibility of the Temple having existed at the south-west angle, as restored