Page:Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894.djvu/221

Rh suggesting that tHe group of buildings, of which the one planned was the northern one, were surrounded by an outside wall.

I send photographs of the ornamentation found by Mr. Hunter. nos. 1 and 7 are two sides of one block, 3 or 4 inches thick; 5 and 10 of another, and 4 and 9 of a third, these, with No. 3, are of stucco. Professor T. Hayter Lewis, who has seen the photographs, writes: "They must, I suppose, have been worked by hand on stone slabs; but the stucco must be singularly strong to have stood exposure to the weather of Palestine for hundreds of years. The fragments are evidently part of a screen, as is shown by their being ornamented on both sides. The stucco foliage is very gracefully designed and carved in the sharp Byzantine Greek style. The interlaced work on Nos. 4 and 10 appears to be a different and more western type Unfortunately no mouldings occur on any of the fragments photographed, nor is the external form of the apse described, nor the kind of masonry, all very important points in forming an opinion as to their date; and all that I can say is that I see no reason to suppose that the fragments are Jewish, and that I know of no such work in Herodian times so utterly debased as the capital No. 8. They were carved by Byzantine Greek workmen, and I don't think that this would have been before A.D. 600."

Major Conder writes me: "I have no doubt at all that the fragments of which you kindly send me photos, are either Early Crusaders' work or Late Byzantine work. They could not be Herodian or Jewish. I have seen much of both styles in dated buildings. The Basket work is Byzantine, but was used by the Crusaders in their earlier work (about 1130 A.D.) My impression at Jericho was that, excepting some of the aqueducts, nearly all the remains belonged to the time when there were so many famous monasteries round Jericho—twelfth, thirteenth centuries A.D."

The tile. No. 6, is interesting, as it contained a bit of circular glass fastened to the tile by plaster.

Whatever the date of Khurbet el Mefjir, the ruins excavated in the Russian property north-west of the hotel are of the same period. The mound is quite extensive, but at present excavated properly only at the east end. You enter by a door at the east into a court paved with tesseræ, with a small cistern 3 feet square at its north-east corner, 21 inches deep, surrounded by a wall 20 inches high, and fed by a drain pipe. Beyond this court there is a higher pavement, probably once approached from the first by steps. These, then, probably belonged to the same period, but in the section at the side of the cutting there appears a pavement of a later period. The latest construction were evidently of mud-brick and rubble. Cuttings made further west reveal stone walls, columns, &c.

It is interesting to note that the pavements are several feet below the surface of the surrounding gardens, showing how the plain has been raised by the decay of vegetation.

I also visited and made a plan of the low small mounds in the vicinity of Birket el Jiljulieh, which Conder suggests may be traces of the