EXCAVATIONS IN THE ROCKS. 311 Jacob shall possess their possessions, and there shall not be any remaining of the house of Esau."1 Several of the other mounds of ruins, or rather foundations, we attempted to trace; but we were unsuccessful in our endeavours to reduce them to particular form. They are very extensive, showing that the city, in the days of old, must have been much crowded with public and private edifices. One of them indicates a very large building. An isolated column, and the frustra of some of its associates, which seem to have had a very gentle fall, particularly attract attention. Our guides called it by the name of elMuzánah, and not by the indecent name mentioned by Burckhardt. In the examination of the excavations of Petra, which form its greatest attraction to the traveller, we commenced with those on the northern side of the valley. As a minute description of them individually, without figures to illustrate them, would only to no purpose exhaust the patience of my gracious reader, I shall be brief in the notices which I may give of some of the most remarkable of them. An unfinished tomb, with the capitals of four pillars making their appearance, and intended to have been superior to some others in its execution and style, is worthy of attention, as it shows that in making the ornamental excavations, the workmen have commenced from above. The same thing, I have observed, has been usually done in the case of the celebrated cave temples at Elephanta, Salsette, Ellora, Ajantá, and other places in the west of India. In fact, it is obviously the easiest way of proceeding. At an insulated rock in the valley called the Farísah,2 containing several plain chambers, the sandstone is most curiously tinted with almost all the varieties of colour which have been already noticed. 1 Obadiah v. 17, 18. 2 Qu. Lion's prey? There is a great multitude of excavations on both sides of the defile by which the brook of Wádí Músá makes its escape through the rocks. Many of them contain merely a single apartment of no great dimensions; and are obviously tombs. Not a few of them are at present quite inaccessible. One of them, called the Tusha, (?) has five pilasters, with representations of lions below. Along the adjoining cliffs are many excavations connected with two terraces, and rising one above another, but much broken and injured, with staircases leading to them. We spent more than a couple of hours in exploring them; for though they were not very remarkable in point of art, being of the most simple construction, many of them unequivocally appeared to us to have been the abodes of the living, and not of the dead; and on this account were deserving of notice, particularly as Dr. Robinson-whose opinion would have been entitled to carry much weight with it, had his stay in Petra permitted him fully to examine its wonders-has stated his belief that all the excavations of Petra are merely tombs.1 In these excavations we sometimes found apartments and recesses which did not at all appear fitted for the reception of coffins or sarcophagi, but obviously intended for family convenience. Some of them have windows as well as doors. In front of two or three of them are receptacles for water. They are approachable by a common way, exactly such as the wants of living inhabitants would suggest, and which has probably formerly been guarded by a railing. Some of them were held by Mr. Smith, my intrepid companion, who noticed all the peculiarities to which I now refer, and formed the same opinion as myself respecting them, to have been magazines, or what in India are called go-downs, for holding merchandise. The original caverns in the rocks of Petra would doubtless suggest them 1 Biblical Researches, vol. ii. p. 532. selves as suitable abodes for a simple people. It is perhaps not too much to consider such residences, as well as the peculiar mountainous position of the cities of Edom, as referred to by the prophet Jeremiah. "Thy terribleness hath deceived thee, and the pride of thine heart, O thou that dwellest in the clifts of the rock, that holdest the height of the hill, though thou shouldst make thy nest as high as the eagle, I will bring thee down from hence, saith the Lord."1 Going along this defile, into which the brook enters, we find a very romantic chasm coming down from the west and north. It is wild and precipitous to an extraordinary degree, and we were unable to ascend by it to the celebrated excavation called the Deir, or "the convent," which we had first noticed when on the summits of Mount Hor. The defile 1 Jer. xlix. 16. When these observations were made, I had not seen the very valuable work of Captains Irby and Mangles, in which quite similar representations are made respecting the very excavations to which they refer. "There are grottos in great numbers, which were certainly not sepulchral, especially near the Palace; there is one in particular which presents a front of four windows, with a large and lofty doorway in the centre. In the interior, one chamber of about sixty feet in length, and of a breadth proportioned, occupies three of the windows and the door at the lower end; the fourth window seems allotted to a very small sleeping chamber, which is not brought down to the level of the floor of the great apartment, but has a chamber below it of the same size, receiving no light but from the entrance. This, which seems the best of all the excavated residences, has no ornament whatever on the exterior; and the same applies to all the other excavations of this nature. The access to this house is by a shelf gained out of the side of the mountain;2 other inferior habitations open upon it, and more particularly an oven and some cisterns. These antique dwellings are close to an angle of the mountain, where the bed of the stream, after having traversed the city, passes again into a narrow defile, along whose steep sides an excavated suburb is continued, of very small and mean chambers, set one above another, without much regularity, like so many pigeon-holes in the rock, with flights of steps or narrow inclined plains leading up to them; the main-wall and ceiling only of some were in the solid, the fronts and partitions being built of very indifferent masonry with cement."-Irby and Mangles' Travels, pp. 426. 427. 2"He that heweth him out a sepulchre on high, and that graveth an habitation for himself in a rock."--Isaiah xxii. 16. |