Haifa, Feb. 2.—I narrated in my last letter the disappointment I experienced when, after making a pilgrimage to the north end of the Lake of Tiberias for the express purpose of seeing some stones covered with inscriptions and pictorial representations, said to be in the possession of the agent of a rich Arab proprietor, I found their owner gone and the relics locked up in a building of which he had taken the key, and all ingress to which was impossible. The Bedouin sheik whom I had picked up as a guide at a neighboring encampment, seeing my chagrin, comforted me by the assurance that if I would only follow him he would take me to a place where I could find others which were quite as good. I mounted my horse, therefore, in somewhat better spirits, as from his description of the locality I knew it must have escaped the attention of all former travellers, and consoled myself by the reflection that a discovery of some importance might still be in store for me.
Our way took us due north across the fertile plain of the Butêha, an alluvial expanse about two miles in length by one in breadth, formed by the detritus which, in the course of ages, has been washed down the Jordan, and the winter torrents which rush into the plain down the wadys that descend from the elevated plateau of Jaulan.
The Butêha is not unlike the plain of Genesareth. Both are well watered and extremely fertile. Butêha has the largest and most prominent brooks, Genesareth the most numerous and abundant springs. The old traveller, Burckhardt, says that the Arabs of the Butêha have the earliest cucumbers and melons in all this region. It was on this plain, at the foot of the hill or “tell” we were now approaching, that Josephus fought the Romans under Sylla, concerning which battle he says: “I would have performed great things that day if a certain fate had not been my hinderance, for the horse on which I rode and upon whose back I fought fell into a quagmire and threw me to the ground, and I was bruised on my wrist and was carried into a certain village called Cuphernome or Capernaum.”
The tell which rises from this plain, about a mile and a half from the lake, is thickly strewn with ruins, consisting of hewn blocks of black basalt, with which, in the ancient times, all the houses in this region were constructed; but as yet no traces of any large building have been discovered. It has, indeed, been very rarely visited, but it is considered by many to be the site of Bethsaida-Julias and the scene of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. At present all we know for certain is that one of the Bethsaidas was somewhere in the Butêha; that Josephus in his descriptions advanced it to the dignity of a city, both by reason of the number of inhabitants it contained and its other grandeur; and that inasmuch as the plain of the Butêha contains many heaps of ruins, none of any very great extent, any of them may be Bethsaida, while if it were a large city in our modern acceptation of the term, the whole plain would not be large enough to contain it.
Indeed, one is much struck in exploring the ruins of the country by the limited areas which they cover. I am afraid to say how many sites of ruined towns I have visited in Palestine, certainly not less than forty; and I think one could crowd them all into the area occupied by the ruins of one large ancient Egyptian city—Arsinoë in the Fayoum, for instance; but then the ruins of an Egyptian city are composed mainly of mounds of potsherds, while these consist of large blocks of building stone, either limestone or basalt, measuring generally two feet or two feet six one way, and a foot or eighteen inches the other. Then they are usually comparatively near together; all around the Lake of Tiberias, and in the country in its vicinity, they are generally not more than from one to three miles apart; so that this section of country must have been very thickly peopled. The ruins of Et-Tell are now built over by the Arabs, who live in a squalid village among the basalt blocks which formed the mansions inhabited by the more highly civilized race which occupied the country in the days when all this region was the favourite haunt of Christ and his disciples.
Leaving Et-Tell on our left, we followed the east bank of the Jordan for more than a mile. This river is here very rapid, and, splitting into numerous streams, whirls past the small islets they form. It is the very ideal of a trout stream, on which on some more propitious occasion I propose to cast a fly. Meantime, even had I been provided with the requisite tackle, I should have been obliged to forego the temptation. It was on the steep rise of a hill, about a hundred yards from the river, that my guide suddenly stopped. Here was a small collection of Arab hovels, recently constructed, and it was in their search for stone, last summer, that the natives had for the first time uncovered the ruin which now met my delighted gaze.
I found myself in the presence of a building the character of which I had yet to determine, the walls of which were still standing to a height of eight feet. The area they enclosed was thickly strewn with building-stones, fragments of columns, pedestals, capitals, and cornices. Two at least of the columns were in situ, while the bases of others were too much concealed by piles of stone to enable me to determine their original positions. My first impression, from the character of the architecture which was strewn about, was that this was formerly a Roman temple; but a further and more careful examination convinced me that it had originally been a Jewish synagogue, which at a later period had been converted to another use; probably it had been appropriated by the Byzantines as a basilica, or Christian church. This was the more probable, as the existing walls had evidently been built upon the foundations of a former structure. The massive stones were set in mortar, which is not the case with the synagogues hitherto discovered; and I should doubtless have been completely at fault in classing this building had my attention not been already directed to the remains of the synagogues brought to light recently by the exertions of the Palestine Exploration Fund.
I was now fortunately in a position to compare the dimensions, ground-plan, and architectural fragments which were strewn about, with those which distinguish the synagogues already discovered, in regard to whose original character there can be no doubt, as the Hebrew inscriptions and sacred Jewish symbols carved on the lintels prove it. The building measured forty-five feet by thirty-three, which is exactly the measurement of the small synagogue at Kefr-Birim. The columns were exactly of the same diameter. The floor was depressed, and reached by a descent of two steps, which were carried around the building in benches or seats each a foot high, the face of the upper one ornamented by a thin scroll of floral tracery. These features occur in the synagogue at Irbid. There was a single large stone cut into the shape of an arch, which had evidently been placed on the lintel of the principal entrance, like the one which stands to this day over the doorway of the great synagogue at Kefr-Birim. The niches, with the great scallop-shell pattern which distinguishes them, almost exactly resemble those of the synagogue of Kerazeh or Chorazin; while the cornice, which was extremely florid, and not unlike what in modern parlance is called “the egg-and-dart pattern,” though differing in some respects from the cornices hitherto observed, was evidently of the same school of design. The capitals were two feet three inches high, and Corinthian, in the same style and of the same dimensions as those of the small synagogue of Kefr-Birim, and there was the upper fragment of two semi-attached fluted columns, with Doric capitals, the ditto of which is to be found at Irbid. The two columns in situ exactly answer in position those of several of the synagogues, and though the position of the door, which was in the centre of the western wall, was somewhat unusual, this was accounted for by the fact that the building had been excavated from the hillside, so that the top of the east wall, nine feet of which was still standing, was level with the surface of the slope of the hill.
The only convenient entrance was in the wall of the side immediately opposite to it. The name of this most interesting locality was ed-Dikkeh, a spot hitherto unvisited by any traveller. Indeed, if it had been visited, it would have been passed unnoticed, for its antiquarian treasures have only been revealed for the first time a few months ago. The word ed-Dikkeh means “platform,” a name, considering its position, not inappropriate; but I have not been able to identify it with any Biblical site.
The area of ruins apart from those of the synagogue itself was not very large, but the situation was highly picturesque. Half a mile to the north of where we stood the Jordan forces its way through a gorge which I hope some day to explore, while immediately below us it rushed between numerous small islets. Opposite the hills swelled gently back from its western bank, behind us they rose more abruptly to the high table-land of Jaulan, while to the southward stretched the plain of Butêha, with the Lake of Tiberias in the distance.
Meantime the few wild-looking natives who inhabit this remote locality clustered around me, as they watched me measuring and sketching, with no little suspicion and alarm. “See,” said one to another, “our country is being taken from us.” My request for old coins only frightened them the more. They vehemently protested that not one had been found, an assertion which, under the circumstances, I felt sure was untrue; nor did the most gentle and reassuring language, with tenders of backshish—which was nevertheless greedily accepted—tend to allay their fears. I have forgotten to mention what was perhaps the most interesting object of all, and this was the carved figure of a winged female waving what seemed to be a sheaf in one hand, while her legs were doubled backward in a most uncomfortable and ungraceful position. It was on an isolated slab about six inches thick, and two feet one way by eighteen inches the other.
The area of the hillside all around was strewn with the blocks of building-stone of which the town had been built. It had apparently not been a very large place, but as the villagers will probably continue their excavations for their own purposes next summer, it is not at all unlikely that they may bring some more interesting remains to light. I earnestly impressed upon them the necessity of preserving these, promising another visit next year, when I would reward them in proportion to the carvings, coins, or other antiquities they could provide for me; but they listened to my exhortation with such a stupid and suspicions expression of countenance that I did not derive much encouragement from their reluctant consent.