Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 1.djvu/160

 14- A History of Art in Sardinia and Judaea. CHAPTER II. HISTORY OF THE TEMPLE. § i. — Topography of Jerusalem. In the last three hundred years modern inquiry has occupied itself with the temple of Jerusalem, and, like the Jews of the captivity, has endeavoured to reconstruct its former image, now for ever destroyed. To this end texts have been pressed into service, and twisted this side and that side ; but the result has been a temple of straw upon a foundation of shifting sand ; no one having thought of so elementary a matter as the configuration of the mount that supported the edifice, nor of the modifications, arti- ficial or otherwise, which time and the hand of man had wrought. Added to this, was the difficulty of penetrating into the Haram- esh-Sherif, so that for long years only a very imperfect idea could be formed of the site upon which the temple had stood. Recent explorations, however, have brought to light a whole mass of evidence, and have made possible a description of the area of Jerusalem and of that of the temple. Jerusalem is emphatically a mountain city. Built on the summit of that long ridge which traverses Palestine from north to south, its western slopes overlook the Mediterranean, whilst the steeper declivities eastward run to the Dead Sea and the Jordan. The city stands on the southern extremity of a spur or plateau, enclosed by two ravines, which bear the familiar names of Kedron and Hinnom (Fig. 106). The ravines rise north of Jerusalem, within a short distance of each other ; the Kedron runs eastward for a mile and a half, and then makes a sharp bend to the south ; while the Hinnom, after following a direction nearly south for a mile and a quarter, turns to the east and joins the former at Bîr Eyûb, a