Page:Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894.djvu/249

Rh century, when the Khalifs ruled in Damascus, or at least to the times of Nûr ed Din and Saladin when ruling there. The tribal wars between the Fellahin and the Arabs of Kerak, and beyond Jordan, continued, however, till the present century, as I have shown in the Memoirs—"Taiyibeh"(Vol. III).



pp. 268 and 269 of the Quarterly Statement for October, 1890, will be found an account, with illustration by Dr. Chaplin, of a stone mask obtained by him from Er Ram, and which Professor Petrie believed to be "of Canaanite origin."

The same curious object forms the subject of an interesting note by the late Rev. Greville J. Chester on p. 84 of the Quarterly Statement for January, 1891. He says that he had "seen several of somewhat similar make, but of pottery, found near Um Rit, in Northern Syria," and that he thinks that one "representing a bearded head, is in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford." He supposes these objects to be Græco-Phœnician, and "perhaps of votive character,"

Major Conder takes up the very interesting discussion on p. 186 of the Quarterly Statement for April, 1891, and refers to the mention of the stone-mask in the "Memoirs," vol. iii, p. 438, and to its having been shown him by Dr. Chaplin. He does not think that it could ever "have been used as a real mask," and it "seems" to him "that it might be of any date from the twelfth century A.D. backwards."

This seems to me to be all that has been put forward in the Quarterly Statement concerning this most curious relic, which I have often examined and thought over when, during Dr. Chaplin's absence from Jerusalem, it was kept for safety in the London Jews' Society's Mission Library at Jerusalem, and I would take the liberty of hazarding a suggestion concerning it and the pottery masks mentioned by Mr. Chester and similar ones which I have seen in a collection of "antiques" at Jerusalem, and among antiquities offered for sale by dealers at Jaffa.

The readers of the Quarterly Statement will forgive me for reminding them of the remarkable and interesting classic pagan custom of suspending "oscilla" or "little faces" of Logreus—Dionysos—Bacchus in the vineyards, "to be turned in every direction by the wind, because it was supposed that whichever way they looked they made the vines in that quarter fruitful."—"Virgil," Georg. ii, 388-392.

On p. 846 of the second edition of Smith's "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities" will be found two figures: one being the representation of a beautiful "oscillum" of white marble, which, it is stated, is in 