Page:Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894.djvu/142

118 quietly smoking his water-pipe, seated on a carpet on the floor of his cave, when suddenly a soldier's head appeared! We must suppose that his nonchalance was dramatically assumed, for he could hardly have been unaware of the mining under his feet. Through this hole made by the Turks over 250 years ago the cave may be approached to-day.

The Emir was taken on board the fleet and conducted to Constantinople; for three years he was permitted to live in domestic retirement on a liberal allowance, but in 1635 in revenge for some deed committed by one of his sons against the Turks he was executed. If the reader cares to follow the career of this illustrious man more fully, I refer him to the second volume of Churchill's "Mount Lebanon."



a photograph of a marble fragment found at Jebail, now in the museum of the Syrian Protestant College at Beyrout. Anything found at Jebail is interesting, from the extreme antiquity of this Phœnician site. The inhabitants are probably mentioned in 1 Kings, v, 18, as engaged in hewing stones for the Temple of Solomon. It is interesting to note that even to the present day certain villages of this district are famed for certain crafts; for example, the inhabitants of Shweir in the Lebanon are largely masons, and ply their trade as far as the Hauran.

In the collection of letters from Tell-el-Amarna in the British Museum there are thirteen letters from Rib-Adda, the Egyptian Consul in Gebal. As in the case of so many other Syrian sites, the name given to this place in Græco-Roman times never thoroughly supplanted the old name, which in course of centuries was restored. By the time of the Crusaders, the Greek name Byblos had disappeared, and the place was called Giblet. The modern name is even more like the original.

Philo, of Byblos, gives a free translation of a work by the Phœnician Sancthoniathon, who wrote probably in the second or third century B.C. Gebal is represented as being the oldest city in the world, having been built by the God El, at the beginning of time. It seems very probable that Gebal exercised the hegemony, at first, over the other Phœnician cities until it was over-topped by the importance of Sidon. It, however, was always a strong religious centre, and Renan called it the "Jerusalem of the Lebanon." In Græco-Roman times the mysteries of Astarte and Adonis were celebrated here. The older Phœnician worship passed over to Grecian types, as shown by the statues. I have seen in a private house in London a piece of Phœnician sculpture from the Lebanon: a beautiful Venus, entirely Greek, with her hand on the head of a priest of the pure Phœnician type, as shown in the ungraceful Cypriote art.