many nations, and a blight on their hearts and minds for thirteen centuries.

The science of our age, as well as its religion, is indebted to this land. Our present names for many of the elementary sciences are derived from its primeval language, and attest either that the intellects of the men of the desert were fertile in the inverse ratio of their country, or that the race who dwelt there were very nearly and intimately connected with some original fountain of civilization, respecting which our historical knowledge is very scanty. Alphabet and cipher, algebra, alchemy, and chemistry, almagest and almanack, are Syro-Arabian words. And though astronomy, and geography, and navigation, have acquired new names of European derivation, they, no less than astrology, and magic, and divination, were cultivated by the nations which spoke the various dialects of the Syro-Arabian, including the people of Arabia Proper, of which we speak, and prove the energy with which they sought, both to unravel the secrets of the material universe, and to solve those dark and mysterious problems, which have perplexed the thinking mind of every age.

Before we confine our attention to Idumæa, we shall take a survey of this land, and of its peculiar people.

It will be observed, that Arabia is physically divided into two unequal parts by a valley, which extends from the Dead Sea to the Eastern or Elanitic Gulf of the Red Sea. In the Old

Testament Scriptures (Deut. ii. 8) we read of "the way of the plain," in connexion with Elath and Ezion-gaber, (or Ezion-geber.) In the original it is Ha-Arabah, The Arabah, evidently a proper name; and this proper name, unchanged, (El-Arabah,) is the name to this day of the valley which, beginning at Elath and Ezion-geber, extends to the Dead Sea, a distance of more than a hundred miles.

On the west this valley is bounded by a lofty line of cliffs, forming an abutment of the Desert of Sinai, which lies at a general elevation of twelve or fifteen hundred feet above its bed. On the east the mountains of Edom rise a thousand feet above the opposite bluffs on the west, and raise the plateau of the great eastern desert to a similar elevation above that of the western. Both the eastern and western mountain boundaries are intersected with innumerable wadys, (valleys,) but there are none of them made glad by a perennial stream. The occasional torrents which flow down through them are partly lost in the sands of "The Plain," and partly find their way to the Red Sea on the south, and to the Dead Sea on the north. The most elevated part of the valley is midway

The Hebrew word, Arabah, means a desert, plain, or steppe. With the article, it is a proper name. And of the place so designated there can be no doubt, both from the preservation of the very word in the modern Arabic appellation of the valley between the Dead and Red Seas, and the circumstances connected with it in Scripture. It is worthy of remark, that the Dead Sea is called "the sea of The Arabah," Deut. iv. 49; Josh. iii. 16; xii. 3; 2 Kings xiv. 25. "The Plain," or "The Arabah," will be our common designation of the yalley in this volume.

between the two seas, or, according to some, still further south-a fact which has an important bearing on the interesting question of the course of the Jordan, anterior to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.* The old opinion was, that the Dead Sea did not exist at all previously, but that the whole space now covered by it was occupied by a fertile plain, through which the Jordan flowed. The discovery of the Valley of the Arabah added greatly to the probable correctness of this opinion. The valley seemed to exist for the very purpose of carrying the stream southward. The investigations of Dr. Robinson, Dr. Wilson, and others, have, however, elicited facts which it is not easy to reconcile with this theory. The Dead Sea is bounded on the south, where the course of the Jordan must have passed if it flowed to the Red Sea, by a line of cliffs a hundred feet high, interrupted only by the narrow Wady el-Jeib; and the elevation of the Arabah, fifty or sixty miles further south, is considerably higher. The natural conclusion is, that there had always existed a lake between the mountains of Judah and the mountains of Moab, into which the Jordan poured its waters. The plain of Sodom, on this supposition, occupied the site of the present southernmost branch of the lake, or "back water," as Irby and Mangles call it, and which is, in fact, almost a detached part of it, being separated from the larger portion of the

*See a previous volume in this Series, "The Jordan and the Dead Sea," on this subject.

lake by a low peninsula, which extends out from the eastern shore across three-fifths of the basin's breadth, leaving the two portions of the lake connected only by a narrow channel.*

Although the facts ascertained by recent travel determine that the Jordan could not flow through the Wady Arabah as it now exists, the possibility will occur to some minds of some great change of levels having been effected by the catastrophe which overwhelmed Sodom and Gomorrah. An elevation may have been produced in the middle of "the Plain," and a depression in its northern parts by that convulsion. But the extent of the elevation and depression which this supposition requires, judged of by any data within our reach, transcends the Scripture narrative. The Dead Sea is 1,312, and the Lake of Tiberias 328 feet below the level of the Mediterranean. The occurrence of this depression, and the raising of the Wady Arabah above the level of the sea, when the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, would not only have involved in it the overthrow of the cities of the plain, but was sufficient to have convulsed to their overthrow the whole lands of Canaan, Moab, Ammon, Edom, and the Desert, to the probable destruction of all their inhabitants. No such convulsion, however, would seem to have taken place. The neighbouring city of Zoar, immediately beyond the plain on which Sodom stood, was unhurt. * Robinson's Researches, vol. ii. p. 547.

Abraham, living near Hebron in the mountains of Judah, not many miles from the Dead Sea, had cognizance of the destruction of the cities of the plain only, apparently, by beholding the smoke of the country going up as the smoke of a furnace. Dr. Kitto thinks that our information is too imperfect to enable us to rest with implicit confidence upon the view which has obtained since the publication of Robinson's Researches. But existing evidence is certainly far from sufficient to render it probable that the Wady Arabah was within any historical period the channel of the river Jordan.

The general character of the Valley of the Arabah is that of a plain of sand, desert and sunburnt, averaging in width from six to nine miles, but in some places twelve miles broad. But it is by no means monotonous or uniform. Dr. Wilson approached it from the Desert of Sinai, and took seven hours in crossing it diagonally. He did not find it so level on the surface as he expected, but barren as the desert itself. Where he traversed the valley, it had commonly a very hard stony bottom. Patches of softer material, but with very little soil in it, occurred here and there. Many boulders and rounded stones, of red and white granite, porphyry, basalt, sandstone, and lime, such as are found in beds of rivers running between mountains of different formations, were_scattered in various parts over its surface. In recrossing the Arabah, to the north of Mount Hor, Dr. Wilson found it still, as further to the south,