Body: | The Wilderness of Zin
C. Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence
1914-1915 AD
CHAPTER IV
AIN KADEIS AND KOSSAIMA
(The Wilderness of Zin, Woolley and Lawrence, 1914-1915 AD)
I. Ain Kadeis
Below the Negeb proper, and divided from it on the west by a broad
depression, is a mass of steep white hills, grouped in a cluster of peaks
and ridges that have different names among the different Arab tribes, and
from different sides. The westernmost part of the range (on the map called
Jebel um Hashim) runs down from the central height in a spur called Jebel
el Ain, and afterwards in a long broken chain of less notable hills
extending to Jebel Muweilleh, a flinty peak some miles within the Egyptian
border. This chain of foothills is important geographically, in that it
divides two water-systems. To the north of it is a running-together of
wadies into a plain about Kossaima, and to the south of it is another
running-together of wadies to simulate a second plain, which modern writers
have called the plain of Ain Kadeis (Plate X). This second plain is held in
by considerable hills: on the east is Jebel el Ain, a rugged bow of cliffs
in limestone and flint, with only one possible way over it; on the north is
the watershed already mentioned, a procession of pointed hills; on the west
and south there are no steep places, but rows of inconspicuous ridges,
slowly adding up to a modest height. Looked at from these boundaries the
contours of the lower ground fall flat, whereas in reality the whole
surface is irregular, running up here and there into tolerable hills, and
all seamed with stony torrent-beds. The soil is sandy, between stones, and
there are only rare traces of ancient cultivation. The Arabs - husband-men
here without hope - still plough each winter a little of the further wady
beds, and in wet years reap a harvest. But Ain Kadeis is the only water of
the district, and that a spring on the westward slopes of the great
mountain far up the Wady Ain Kadeis.
The name Kadeis (Kadeis, in Hejazi Arabic, is a scoop or bailer used in the
bath for purification. The Sinai Arabs use such scoops (of wood) to lift up
water from a shallow well. It does not mean `holy', as Trumbull and other
writers have assumed.) was so reminiscent of Kadesh-Barnea of the
Israelites, that as soon as it was recorded of a spring it naturally loomed
up in western eyes with an importance inexplicable locally. The Arabs know
nothing of a plain of Ain Kadeis: to them the name is that of a
water-spring in a small valley called after it, and the great area of low
land outside the mouth of this valley is not a plain at all, or connected
with its tributary wady in any way by name. Yet one party of travellers
after another set out, either from Syria or from Egypt, with this obscure
water-hole as their avowed object. Ain Kadeis is too small to water the
flocks of other than the few poor families who live near it, and, as we
found, too remote from all roads to come to the notice of such Arab guides
as live at any distance. But this native ignorance was interpreted as
deep-seated policy, and so foreigners came to believe that the spring had
remained, from the time of Moses, still a holy place (we do not really know
whether even Moses thought it holy) - some great head of water in an oasis
too beautiful and too precious to be disclosed to Christian eyes. Its Arabs
took on a sinister character: they became by degrees inhospitable, sullen,
fanatical, treacherous, bloody. And yet all the time, had the world but
known it, the place had been seen, measured, and described by Palmer on his
visit in 1870, (Desert of the Exodus, ii, 350.) with his usual minute
accuracy and vividness. The account given by Rowlands, who was the first to
see the spring in 1842, while mainly recording his personal emotions,
tallied well enough with Palmer's in essentials; and there the matter would
have ended, but that a Mr. H. C. Trumbull, an American, spent a single hour
at the spring in 1882, and wrote round his visit a very large book. with
fantastic descriptions of the valley (We need not give measurements of the
valley. They have been published admirably by Professor George L. Robinson,
McCormick Seminary, Chicago, in articles in the Biblical World in 1901 and
1910. He gives a plan of the valley and springs, with photographs. His
whole description is so clear and accurate that it may well be regarded as
final. The account in the Homiletic Review of April and May, 1914, by
Professor Coborn of Alleghany Coll., Meadville, Pa., is not worth
discussion. In the Revue Biblique for July, 1906, the French Benedictines
have done work as good as Professor Robinson's in accuracy and authority.
In Z.D.P.V., vol 37, part i, Dr. Kuhtreiber describes his visit made in
March, 1912. His is the fullest and best account of Ain Kadeis in print,
and' we regret that ours was written before we saw his article. We
supplement him, however, in some details. Dr. Musil, in his heavy book on
Edom (ii, pp. 176 - 181) gives good photographs of the valley, and a very
poor description. Of older writers one should mention Holland, who is
faithful, and in particular the second letter of Rowlands. He was
astonished at Trumbull's discovery, and, though in old age, set out at once
to Egypt, visited Kadeis, and wrote him a simple account of his trip,
published in the P.E.E Quarterly for July, 1884.) and wells. The work,
however, was plausible, and has unfortunately been accepted by biblical
geographers (e.g., Hastings' Bible Dictionary, art. Kadesh-Barnea.) as the
authority on the district. As for the remainder of Trumbull's book, it is
full of varied argument, often irrelevant, some philology, and a large
confrontation of the views of everyone, good or bad, who had mentioned
Kadesh-Barnea throughout the ages. His account, which we had with us at Ain
Kadeis, says (Kadesh-Barnea pp. 272, ff.): "It was a marvellous sight! Out
from the barren and desolate stretch of the burning desert waste we had
come into an oasis of verdure and beauty... A carpet of grass covered the
ground. Fig trees laden with fruit nearly ripe enough for eating were along
the shelter of the southern hill-sides. Shrubs and flowers showed
themselves in variety and profusion. Running water gurgled under the waving
grass.... A circular well, stoned up from the bottom with time-worn
limestone blocks, was the first receptacle of the water... the mouth of
this well was only about three feet in diameter, and the water came to
within three or four feet of the top. A little distance westerly from this
well and down the slope was a second well, stoned up much like the first,
but of greater diameter.... A basin or pool of water larger than either of
the wells, but not stoned up like them, was seemingly the principal
watering place. It was a short distance south-westerly from the second
well.... Another and yet larger pool, lower down the slope, was supplied
with water by a stream which rippled and cascaded along its narrow bed from
the upper pool; and yet beyond this, westward, the water gurgled away under
the grass... and finally lost itself in the parching wady....There was a
New England look to this oasis, (On this compare our photographs.)
especially in the flowers, and grass, and weeds.... Bees were humming
there, and birds were flitting from tree to tree.... As we came into the
wady we had started up a rabbit, and had seen larks and quails. It was, in
fact, hard to realize that we were in the desert, or even near it. The
delicious repose of the spot after our journey over the arid gravel waste
under the blazing mid-day sun was most refreshing.... Our Arabs seemed to
feel the soothing influences of the place, and to have lost all fear of the
Azazmeh. After a brief rest on the grass they all stripped and plunged into
the lower and larger pool for a bath."
A note by Dr. Trumbull should in justice to him be reprinted with this
extract of the text. He said: `In writing up this description from my
hurried notes made on the spot, I find room for question at one or two
points, as to the distance and bearings of the several wells and pools one
from another, but I give the facts at these points as accurately as I can
recall them.'
As a general comment we can only say that this account is as minutely
accurate in its measurements as it is inaccurate in its descriptive matter.
The valley of Ain Kadeis is unusually naked, even among the valleys of the
south country. At its mouth it is a broad, flood-torn wilderness of stone,
about which a torrent-bed twists from side to side, shallow and spreading
in the longer stretches, but cut twelve or fifteen feet deep through
limestone shingle at the bends. In the side of the valley are the last
remains of rough terrace-walling, and near by, a little to the north of the
wady entrance on the sand-hills, we found ancient remains. There were eight
poor ring-graves, some sherds of Byzantine pottery, and a few rough stone
foundations that might in courtesy be called a farmhouse. These late
Christian remains seemed to us probably to mark the highest level of the
population of old Kadeis. (Though Mr. Pickering Clarke, in the REE
Quarterly for October, 1883, says `the city itself was possibly a Hittite
shrine ... from a city so important the whole dis-trict round would take
its name.' We will not print comments on this.)
After the entrance the valley quickly draws in and becomes, if possible,
more stony than before. On each side the hills are very steep and bare, and
shine painfully white in the glare of the sun. There is nowhere any green
place, or any smooth ground, until the actual spring is reached; instead,
great polished boulders have rolled off the cliff-sides into the stream
bed, and at times half block the water channel with their huge bulk. In and
out of such as these, over small and slippery stones, up and down the steep
torrent bank leads the rough track to the wells. In all its length the Wady
Ain Kadeis is a most unmitigated desert.
The springs themselves are made up of two or three water-holes under a
cliff (Plate XI). From these flow out steady trickles of water, very good
and sweet (`like sugar' say the Arabs), constant throughout winter and
summer. They unite in a tiny stream which runs under the rocks, forming
occasional pools, for about a hundred yards, and then comes to a stagnant
and smelly end beneath a mighty boulder. The flow of water is a plentiful
one for the needs of the few nomad households that now are the miserable
population of the valley. Certainly they could not water there at one time
all their little flocks for lack of room (our men brought our camels two by
two), but in this dry country the smallest running water is a precious
thing, and so Wady Kadeis, in spite of its lack of pasture and of smooth
ground for camping, has always two or three families living in its
side-ravines, and the local Arabs have profited by the opportunity of
constant water to establish a graveyard on a hillock near at hand (Plate
XII, z). The goats of these Arabs, and their camels, continually driven to
the well, have formed round it a patch of manure heavy enough to hide the
boulders underneath, and to give root-hold to a little grass. This tiny
plot, existing on sufferance of the winter floods, is the verdure that in
Trumbull's eyes blotted out the sterile slopes around: just as the fig
trees, from which his patience presently expected ripe figs, are two or
three stunted roots of the uneatable wild sort, growing under cover of some
larger boulders in the torrent-bed round a corner below the springs. The
biggest of these bushes has old gnarled branches growing to more than a
man's height, but the others are difficult to find. (Professor Coburn finds
food for thobght in the saying of his Arab that no man had ever planted
those trees.) (Plate XII, I).
Trumbull celebrates particularly the flowers of the valley, but they are
only the common bloom of all the dry country, which flourish for the few
days after rain till the sun's heat cuts them down. While they last, one
who peers between the rocks throughout all Sinai will see a garden in what
from a few feet off is blasted wilderness. Ain Kadeis, with its running
water, is, of course, a little richer than most places at such times.
Lastly, the pool into which Trumbull's Arabs, after stripping, plunged so
rashly to have a bath, is only about a foot or eighteen inches deep, and
full of very large and sharp stones. Our guide also washed his feet in it.
II. Muweilleh and Kossaima
The chain of foothills, insisted upon in the beginning of this chapter as
the watershed between the northern and the southern plains, is crossed by
many paths. One or more ascends each saddle between the peaks, and runs out
into the northern plain between the mouth of Wady el Ain and Jebel
Muweilleh. These roads are very easy ones, and the largest, which leads
down direct upon Kossaima, has on its southern slope the footings of a
ring-booth or two, and a few ring-graves of uncertain date. There is
another path, more difficult, which passes from the valley of Ain Kadeis
over the spur of Jebel el Ain, and descends into Wady el Ain not far from
the mouth of Wady Ain el Guderat. The hills between the roads are striking
little peaks, steep and sharp for the most part, curiously eaten out and
furrowed by the sand-blast and the winter rains, very white, sometimes
capped with a point of harder limestone scarped like a pyramid, sometimes
rounded into huge half-drums, like clustered organ-pipes eighty or a
hundred feet high.
The northern plain is a great contrast to its neighbour on the south. About
Wady Ain Kadeis stretch great wastes of dry watercourses, winding among the
sand-hills, and for the whole district there is only the petty spring of
Ain Kadeis remote in a difficult valley. On the north of the watershed
there are certainly some sandy stretches, and stony parts where limestone
ribs and knolls crop out of the flat; but much of the country is earth
capable of ploughing, and some of it quite fertile tilth. In place of the
solitary Ain Kadeis are Ain Muweilleh, in a soft wady bed; Ain Kossaima, a
plentiful running of water in the sand; and Ain Guderat, a great spring,
not set in a dung-heap like Ain Kadeis, or sand-choked like all other Negeb
springs, but bursting straight from the rock, and running down a deep green
valley of lush grass in swift irrigation channels, or in a long tree-shaded
succession of quiet pools many feet deep. This plain about Kossaima (which
also seems to have no one local name) runs from Muweilleh on the west to
the foot of the great pass of Ras Seram on the east. In fortunate years it
might be very fruitful; and in the worst seasons its crops cannot entirely
fail, thanks to the irrigated valley of Ain el Guderat - the only large
stretch of corn-land under running water which we saw in all the southern
waste. These exceptional advantages, which make this plain the only
readily-habitable spot in the desert, seem from the remains in it to have
been as obvious to its old-time rulers as to the British administrators of
Sinai today.
Ain Muweilleh (The name Muweilleh means a salty place. The description is a
correct one. Vol.) is a convenient starting-point in a description of the
particular features of the district in detail. It and its hills are the
western limits of the good land, and anciently it must have been the most
thronged spring, since the old inland route from Egypt runs under the
cliff-edge of Jebel Mushrag to the watery and climbs up the wady bank just
beyond on its straight way to Ras Seram. On the east side a low limestone
shelf borders the valley, and upon it lie a few rude ruins of an early
period, to be discussed more particularly later on when we come to treat of
the allied remains at Kossaima and in Wady Guderat. Below this limestone
shelf and between its steep edge and the flint screes of Jebel
Mushrag is penned the wady, a broad sandy bed full of deep-rooted tamarisk
trees. The drinking water is little more than a group of shallow pools,
green with slime, in the sandy bottom, which is sodden and slippery with
the heavy damp for many yards around. The place is peculiarly unattractive,
but at the same time very wet, and near it must have been a constant
camping ground. It cannot, however, have had any large or settled
population, since the possible plough-land is limited to the wady bed, and
is sufficient only for the needs of an inconsiderable village.
In passing from Muweilleh to Kossaima the great road to Syria is left to
the north, and a smaller track, tending steadily uphill, leads in about an
hour to this, the second spring of the northern plain. In Palmer's day
Kossaima seems to have been a very barren spot, (Photographs of Kossaima,
before Bramley, are to be found in Musil's Fdom, vol. ii, pp. 183, 185.)
but the Sinai Government, when establishing a police post here, dug out the
spring, and cemented about it a basin with a long canal to take the
overflow (a stream as big as Ain Kadeis) to a drinking trough and
reservoir. Below the reservoir the soldiers have made a garden in which are
palm trees and fruits. The plain for a very wide space about the water-head
is covered with great beds of rushes, and white with salt. The government
post consists of two or three stone-built houses on little limestone
hummocks above the spring. Beyond them on the north are some early graves,
discussed in Chapter II with the other graves we found.
III. Ain el Guderat
From Kossaima the path to Ain el Guderat leads at first over a plain of
flat soil dotted with small bushes as far as the mouth of Wady el Ain, and
then up this great wady for about a mile to the sharp turn on the left
which leads into the tributary valley of Wady Ain el Guderat, called also
locally Wady el Ain for saving of breath. The flat soil of the Kossaima
plain is sand in summer, and very treacherous mud after rain. The Arabs
plough some part of it each autumn, and when the rain is plentiful their
crops are splendid, but if there is no rain they lose their labour for that
year. The extent of clear soil hereabout makes this one of the most
important plough-lands of the neighbourhood. It is now not fully
cultivated, since the needs of its present scanty population are satisfied
with a little part; but there is room enough for the work of many men. Wady
el Ain the greater is rather stony, but with here and there patches of
clear ground, reputed better than the plain outside for the amount of
moisture always present in the soil. Nearly every winter this wady runs
down in a little flood, and very often in its upper course one can find
water in the water-holes (themail).
The smaller valley, Wady Ain el Guderat, opens unpromisingly from Wady el
Ain on the east. The usual road cuts across low banks of limestone dust and
chippings, like giant rubbish heaps, which extend from the north side of
the tributary valley to beyond its middle. After them comes the rough mouth
of the water-course, and beyond again, going southward, hummocky ground of
crumbled limestone. This debris of floods in the entrance explains how
travellers looking for Ain el Guderat have gone up and down the main Wady
el Ain without seeing any traces of it. It is quite a narrow valley, edged
by hill slopes so precipitous and lofty that it may well be called a gorge.
On the south the wall of these limestone steeps is for a great way
unbroken, falling at times in a sheer drop of a hundred feet to the soft
grass of the meadowst beneath. On the north it is a little more open, in
that there are two or three places where side valleys run in, and offer
difficult ways to the Arabs when they want to pass out directly northward
to Ras Seram and Syria. On the west, across the main Wady el Ain, the view
is cut off abruptly by the knife edge of Jebel el Ain, with a stone heap on
the crest of it. To the east is the heart of the hills (Plate XIV). These
cliff-boundaries shelter the valley from the sun of the morning and
evening, and enclose it in an air of remoteness and quiet somewhat spoiled
by the resonant echoes they throw back.
When first seen from the foothills of the mouth the lower part of the
valley appears green or yellow with the crop according to the season, and
has goodly acacia trees standing at intervals along its edge. The soil is
many feet deep, and of very clean earth, a little light perhaps, but
wonderfully good for Sinai. From the fading out of the cultivated land at
the mouth to the source of the water may be two miles or so, and the width
of the bottom varies from one hundred to four hundred yards. The
watercourse in the middle is not, as in all other valleys of the hills, a
sprawling moraine of loose boulders, but is a clear channel, cut five to
fifteen feet into the ground, steep banked, and generally from three to ten
yards in width. It thus wastes only an inconsiderable part of the valley
space, and its depth gives it content enough to carry off all ordinary
floods without damage to the fields on each side. An occasional great flood
may sweep the whole place, leveling trees and washing out the soil, as
happened two years ago; but normally the lower reaches of the torrent-bed
are dry except when it is raining, or when the cultivators, having finished
the watering of their land, turn the stream of their little canals back
into the proper bed.
Each side of the valley is marked off sharply from the hill slopes by a
line of large broom bushes, as great as trees, which push their roots into
the abandoned ditches of two old irrigation channels. That on the south
side is only a dug ditch, winding along the contour of the hills, till it
comes to an end in a great Byzantine reservoir situated in the very mouth
of the valley, at the junction of its south side with the east side of Wady
el Ain. The reservoir is a great work, four-square, and about twenty yards
each way, built in the usual style of the precise Greek masonry, laid in
line, and it still preserves in one corner the opening of the sluice, which
let out its water as required to gardens on the flat land round the elbow
of the hills. The reservoir is, however, now long abandoned, half filled
with earth and stones, and its conduit is only useful to the rethem trees.
(It is perhaps worth noting that Trumbull (Kadesh-Barnea p. 280) suggests
that Moses may have mistaken this Christian reservoir for Hazar-Addar of
Numbers xxxiv, 4.) The northern aqueduct is carried up higher, and is built
of masonry and very poor mortar; it is nearly all destroyed, and,
therefore, very difficult to trace. It may also have gone to Wady el Ain,
but more probably it was made only to bring water to a little Byzantine
village whose remains yet exist in a bay of the northern slope, near the
beginning of the outer foothills. The present waterways are only ephemeral,
a deeper furrow among the crops, as such canals must always be, made each
spring and destroyed each winter in the Arab yearly interchange of plough
and fallow.
The plough-land is broadest on the north side of the stream-bed, and on
this side also are the threshing floor and corn pits of the Guderat tribe,
in front of the ruins of the Byzantine village mentioned above. Behind
them, up a valley, the main road goes out to Ras Seram; east of them the
valley draws in suddenly; and in the very throat of it lies a small tell,
or mound of ruins, blocking up the road (Plate XIII). Against one side of
this mound grows a spreading acacia tree; under the other runs the torrent,
and round about are heaps of small building stones and pottery and ashes.
Round the bend the valley opens out into a splendid field, with some large
trees along the stream, and beyond this again are more fields, up to the
dam across the water, in which the irrigation ditches have their start. The
Arabs do not care to cultivate above this point, and so the winding valley
floor is filled by a dense thicket of reeds, in the midst of which the
stream, now in long pools eight feet deep, edged with flags and bulrushes,
moves more slowly. The spring proper (Ain el Guderat means the spring of
the earthenware kettles, or small spouted pots. Whether it refers to the
rush of water, in contrast to the slow welling up of Ain Kadeis, or to
actual pottery, we know not. The French fathers (Revue Biblique, July,
1906) call it Ain el Mufjer. The spring is sometimes called el Mufjer
locally, to distinguish its force: but this is not a proper name.) is yet
half a mile higher, where a buttress of limestone runs into the valley
(Plate XV). From the foot of it the water gushes out strongly in three
little spouts thick as a man's arm, from deep, narrow fissures in the rock.
The noise of the falling water, the Arabs say, is so great that a man
cannot hear himself speak; perhaps, for the water's sake, they use a
gentler utterance than their wont. The plain of reeds goes far above the
spring, and the land is still moist. Indeed, five minutes' walk higher up
is a built aqueduct of stone and lime leading out of the hill-side and
running across the valley. It probably points to another, but now
forgotten, spring which watered these upper fields.
IV. The Antiquities of the Kossaima District
In the valley of Ain el Guderat are remains of many periods of occupation.
The latest are the Arab graves of the Guderat tribe on the top of the
little tell, and the excavated Arab corn-pits at the foot of the Ras Seram
road. There are other Mohammedan graves - old ones - below the great
Byzantine reservoir in the valley-mouth, which are set in a medley of walls
running about the platform below the reservoir. There may have been
buildings here, but more probably they are only conduits and retaining
walls of terraces in an irrigation scheme; it would be a very good site for
water-gardens, and probably on the abandonment of these the Arab conquerors
took the ground as a suitable graveyard. The tombs are only rings and ovals
of stones very roughly arranged; on some stones were varieties of
tribe-marks, and there was one little stone of the flat disk type, common
in Byzantine cemeteries, with a rude cross scratched on it. Facing this
cemetery, across the valley, is a large underground corn-store of the
ordinary bell shape, but lined with rubble masonry all the way up.
Of Byzantine remains the reservoir already described is by far the largest
and most important; it and the conduits on each side of the valley prove
that in the Byzantine time not only was the whole of the valley-bed proper
in cultivation, but work was extended beyond, over what is now the waste
land of Wady el Ain. The Greek population must therefore have been more
numerous than the present owners of the valley, or have been assured of a
larger market for their produce. One can well imagine that in years of
drought Ain el Guderat fed all the saints of Central Sinai.
The Byzantine village on the north side of the valley, at the spot where
the road to Ras Seram runs into it, is a collection of very simple huts.
The remains now visible are those of from fifteen to twenty poor small
houses, built in unshaped rubble. The plans of them are not very apparent,
for the Guderat tribesmen have dug out their corn-pits among them, and, as
their threshing floor is just below, they usually, for a few weeks in each
year, move their camp to the old village site, and pile up its stones in a
fresh arrangement every time along the back and side curtains of their
tents. None the less, the foundations are certainly Byzantine, for the
ground all about is red with the hard ribbed pottery of Gaza make, peculiar
to Christian ruins everywhere in this part of Sinai. There is no permanent
settlement of Arabs in the valley, through their fear of the climate. It is
believed that anyone who lies there in summer (whether man pr beast) will
be attacked by an intermittent fever of peculiar strength; indeed, even the
cooked meat of animals which have fed in the valley is declared dangerous
by the local authorities in hygiene. As a matter of fact, the large deep
pools of the upper river must be admirable breeding-places for mosquitoes.
Starting above this Byzantine village, and running eastward along the
hill-top, there is one of the long and puzzling walls which, like those
elsewhere in the Negeb, appear to start and go on and end so aimlessly. It
is a wall of dry stone, perhaps three-quarters of a mile long in all, and
still perfectly preserved. It has been piled up very carelessly, from two
to three feet thick, and from three to five feet high. It runs reasonably
directly along the hill, never at the crest, but always a little way down
the valley slope; it crosses gullies on the hill-side, without varying its
height or taking any regard of them; in one place it is broken by plain
openings, flanked internally by a square enclosure, a few feet each way,
like a pound, or a temporary shelter. Its purpose is mysterious. Being on
the downward slope of the hill it would not keep anyone out, and, besides,
it runs only from one side-wady to another, and so would not really protect
anything. It cannot be meant to keep human beings enclosed, for any child
that could crawl would overpass it; nor would it pen any sheep or goat. The
only Arab animal that would find such an erection impassable would be a
camel, and, perhaps, the wall is the monument of some tribe's exasperation
in herding camels. The beasts have a perverse habit of wandering up a steep
hill-side and becoming incurably lost, and this wall, if supported by
fences across the valley at its two ends, would prevent their escape
entirely. The present Guderat tribe disclaim all responsibility for the
work; but they are comparatively new-comers in the district.
When walking across the valley of Ain el Guderat between the Byzantine
reservoir and the village site, we picked up near the torrent bed some
pieces of terra sigillata, the haematite-stained polished pottery of Roman
period. The only fragment of recognizable shape seemed to be that of a cup
of a very late type. There was also, however, a piece of one of the shallow
round-bottomed cups or little bowls of haematitic ware, with classical
ornament moulded in relief on the outside, which occur plentifully in North
Syria in deposits of the 2nd and 1st centuries B.c. These pottery fragments
had almost certainly been brought by water to their present position, and
we could find no traces of the site of the Hellenistic settlement from
which they probably came.
However, all the rest of Northern Sinai can show ruins and remains as good
as these. The great interest of Guderat is in its tell, (First recorded by
Dr. Kuhtreiber, in Z.D.P. V., vol. 37, part i.) which seems to contain a
ruin of a period not represented elsewhere in the Negeb, save in the but
ruins of Muweilleh, the graves at Kossaima, and, perhaps, in the little
guard-houses at Bir Birein and Raheiba on the great road between Hebron and
Egypt. Tell Ain el Guderat is by far the most important of these, since its
walls stand ten feet high, its ground plan is intelligible, and its pottery
bears witness to greater wealth and refinement than we suspected in the
other places.
The tell is a little mound about 200 feet long and 120 feet broad, fairly
regular in shape, and stands now in a heap from twelve to fifteen feet high
above the corn-fields. The sides are very steep, and at first the whole
thing looks only like a pile of round water-worn pebbles and ashes, without
system. This, however, is seen not to be so as soon as one digs anywhere.
The water-worn stones then appear as the filling of walls faced, not
certainly with ashlar, but with limestone blocks selected off the
hill-sides with regard to their squareness of shape and convenience of size
for loading on a camel and for laying (Fig. 8). The design of the building
was a long rectangle, with square towers of slight sally at the four
corners, and a small tower in the middle of each face. The walls were built
hugely thick to a height of ten feet above the ground, when their solidity
seems to have ceased, and they became mere shells of built stone, with a
series of rooms or corridors in their thicknesses. The walls are faced with
well-laid blocks, some as much as three feet long, but all thin and light;
the filling is of river pebbles, large rough stones, and mud. Between the
towers the wall seems to have been sloped out in a talus, which near its
base lines up with the outer faces of the towers; from that point it was
carried down vertically for perhaps two or three courses to the ground. In
our view the plan of the building is superior to its execution.
Fig. 8: Fortress at Ain el Guderat
We dug into one of the rooms on the top of the wall and found that its
sides were standing a yard or more high, and from this, and from a good
deal of surface-scratching while following walls, we have ventured to
reconstruct tentatively the whole building as described. It demands, of
course, far more thorough investigation than we gave it, with our two or
three men, in the three days we were able to spare. Captain A. W
Jennings-Bramley, Governor of Sinai, was good enough to grant us an
emergency permission for the sondages which we undertook.
So far as the western half of the fort is concerned, a single row of
chambers in the wall top, and the tower rooms, seem to have been the only
accommodation provided. The ground level within the high walls of this half
was very low, full of soft dust and quite clear of any indication of walls.
The depth of it is, perhaps, only six or seven feet. The eastern half is,
however, a sort of platform, level with the present top of the enceinte,
and with obvious signs of party walls that crossed and recrossed it, making
a complex of chambers. We had no time to ascertain to what depth these
inner walls descended; probably the whole end of the fort is banked up,
since otherwise they would be from twelve to fifteen feet high. Outside the
main wall of the fort on this eastern side was a low tongue of land bearing
traces of less important buildings. We could see no signs of a gateway
leading into the fort, though such presumably exists.
As seen on paper, the plan might recall that of the great fort at Abda;
actually its style of construction distinguishes the building altogether
from any Byzantine-Christian or Arab work that we have seen elsewhere. The
plan again is not unlike that of some Egyptian forts of the XIIth and
XVIIIth Dynasties; the material is different, for the mud-brick of the Nile
valley was an impossibility in the Sinaitic desert, but the parallel is
perhaps not insignificant. A better indication of date is given by the
pottery. There was not much of this upon the surface; light ashes, rubble
and building-stones from the fallen walls and lumps of clay, that may have
formed the roof, had buried everything; but in the little room which we
cleared and in the debris of the sides of the mound we found any quantity
of broken sherds. There were both wheel-made and hand-made wares, but the
Egyptian types for which we first hoped failed us altogether: the pottery
was purely Syrian. Many large vessels were of a greenish grey clay, turned
on the wheel, not unlike the `gulla' wares of the Nile, but not to be
identified as such. One piece of a cup or tumbler in strongly ribbed
reddish clay, which might by Egyptian analogy be late, has parallels in
Syria that date back to the tenth or twelfth centuries B.c. There were
fairly numerous sherds of the line-burnished haematitic ware (hand-made)
which occurred also in the guard-houses of the Darb el Shur and have been,
in South Palestine, assigned by Macalister to the Second Semitic period
(perhaps rather they belong to the whole period 1800 - 900 B.C.).
Some fragments of fine painted pottery, at first sight closely resembling
some Cypriote fabrics, might belong (also on the analogy of South
Palestinian sites) to the end of the second millennium B.C. Together with
these, there were fragments of rough hand-made wares, thin-walled, of
gritty clay burnt very hard in an open hearth, which are identical with
those found in the graves at the mouth of Wady el Ain el Guderat, in the
ring-graves of Kossaima, and in the but dwellings by the Muweilleh springs.
The evidence furnished by our brief scratching of the soil is not enough to
fix the date of the building with any accuracy. It enables us, however, to
say that we have here in the neck of the wady, commanding the finest
water-supply in all the desert, a building which from the thickness of its
walls may well have been a fort, of Syrian or Semitic, not of Egyptian
origin. It is connected in culture and probably in date with the early
hut-settlements and graves that cluster round the other water-sources of
the district. It was occupied for a comparatively brief period, in the
latter part of the second or the beginning of the first millennium before
our era. Various tempting theories lie obvious to hand, but only thorough
excavation can profitably solve the character of what is beyond question an
interesting and important site.
In the valley of Ain el Guderat we found a worked flint. It may of course
have been a prehistoric one, and, if so, the place would be distinguished
as the only Stone Age site we noted in our part of Sinai: but more probably
it is of Arab manufacture and comparatively modern. The tribesman is a
great maker of flints, and Ain el Guderat, with its flocks and herds, is a
place where they must use many flints each year. Another unpromising object
is a cave in the south wall of the valley: it is a very simple hole, hewn
in the cliff-face about three hundred yards above the tell. Its mouth lies
about a hundred feet above the ground, and is reached by an easy path. The
cliff is of very soft stone, and so the roof has scaled in large masses
which bury the floor deep in chalk and dust. The opening of the cave is
very nearly its greatest width: it seems once to have had side chambers
like a Byzantine tomb, but there is no evidence at all of early date. The
Arabs say that it was dug to extract salt from the rock.
The early graves of the Guderat valley are treated by themselves in Chapter
11, p. 30. Historically the point of importance in connection with them is
that their pottery is that of the tell (except for the lack of painted
ware) and that of the Kossaima graves combined. They thus provide a useful
link between the various remains of the Kossaima district. The graves at
Kossaima also are described in full in the chapter dealing with burials
(Chapter II, p. 29 - 30), and from them one may presume a small rude
settlement in Kossaima also at the Guderat period. We were not successful
in finding any house ruins there: they may have been destroyed, or we may
have missed them; but the point is unimportant as we found plenty of
dwelling-houses and a few graves of exactly the same type at Muweilleh. The
ruins there, r close to the water-pools and the small cave described by
Palmer, appear to be those of a little village containing perhaps thirty
`houses' of a temporary character. The houses are very small, some
rectangular, some circular or semicircular. They are now represented by
very low heaps of large pebbles, so few in number that they must nearly all
have been like the but of our guide from Ras Seram. His house, which he had
furnished with a coffee-pot (for making shrub-coffee) and a water-skin, was
a crescent of piled-up stones, three or four courses high, caulked with
tamarisk leaves, and topped with tamarisk boughs to keep off the wind. He
had rested a few branches horizontally across the wall, anchoring them with
stones, to provide himself with the luxury of a roof: if he was cold he lit
a fire between the horns of the crescent. The only huts at Muweillah not
like this were two or three more magnificent rectangular ones, belonging to
those fortunate owners who had a tent-cloth to roof them in. The pottery
about the settlement was almost entirely the roughest hand-made type of the
district. There were only two or three sherds of the finer wheel-made
wares.
The castle of Ain el Guderat is so enormously better than the remains about
it that one is inclined to ascribe its erection to some outside agency. It
is as much above the huts of Muweilleh as the police station of Kossaima is
above the but of our old guide from Ras Seram. On the other hand, of
course, there is no land and no water at Muweilleh that would justify a
large village, The Rev. Caleb Hauser, in the P.E.F. Quarterly of April,
1908, does not agree with us here. He identifies this Muweilleh with the
biblical Makkelath, and the Latin Mohaila, the military station in the
Notitia. In Christian times, he says, it must have been the seat of an
archbishopric, since Palmer found there traces of Christian occupation. His
first point is etymology, in which we are incompetent; in regard to his
second there are no material classical remains to make probable a Roman
post. As for the Christian remains, Palmer, whom he quotes, in describing
them, is carefully exact upon the two insignificant and widely separated
holes in the chalk which still exist, each with a little cross in red
painted on the wall. (Pere Janssen, in the Revue, Biblique for July, 1906,
has drawn plans of these caves.) All Sinai, Palestine, and Syria are
littered with similar remains. And there is no reason why these particular
caves should have ever contained an archbishop. There was probably another
Muweilleh below Aila on the road to Sinai. It is, unfortunately, a very
common Arab place-name.
V. Kadesh-Barnea
It would perhaps be improper to close this chapter without any reference to
the vexed question of Kadesh-Barnea. The unfortunate vagueness of the
Pentateuch geographically, and its lack of synthesis historically, cause
the end of all such controversies to be a deeper confusion than the
beginning: therefore, so far as possible, we have kept out of our pages any
reference to the barren literature of today which wrangles over
indeterminable Bible sites. In most cases the strife is about a Hebrew
name, and its possible reappearance in a modern Arab form. That glib
catchword `The Unchanging East' has blinded writers to the continual ebb
and flow of the inhabitants of the desert. It is hopeless to look for an
Arab tribe which has held its present dira for more than a very few
generations: and to expect continuity of name, as in settled districts in
Syria, is vanity. A second factor to be remembered is that the Jews were an
unscientific people, anxious only to get through the inhospitable desert as
soon as might be. Research into local nomenclature is today very difficult
among the tribesmen; and it is not likely that' Moses was more patient and
painstaking than a modern surveyor. Probably, as often as not, the
Israelites named for themselves their own camps, or unconsciously
confounded a native name in their carelessness.
At the same time, by good or ill fortune, the problem of Kadesh-Barnea is a
little narrower and a little more documented than most. We are told that
the Jews left Ezion-Geber, and went to the Wilderness of Zin, which is
Kadesh; and that the latter touched on the boundaries of Edom. We know
where Ezion-Geber was, more or less, and where Edom was; though there is
not the faintest light upon her boundaries. Somewhere between these points
the children of Israel seem to have spent nearly forty years. We have no
safe clue as to the numbers of the tribes, nor do we know their social
condition; and this capital ignorance qualifies all discussion as to how
they were disposed. There must, however, have been at least some thousands
of them. They may have been genuine nomads, scattering to all the corners
of the desert in groups of two or three tents, in which case Moses was an
even better organizer than we knew, to gather his people again and launch
them against Palestine as a disciplined army; or they may have been a
tribal group keeping to one district and moving a mile or two in this
direction or in that as they devoured the pasture. If this second view be
accepted, then it is definitely our opinion that only in the Kossaima
district are to be found enough water and green stuffs to maintain so large
a tribe for so long, and that therefore the Wilderness of Zin and
Kadesh-Barnea must be the country of Ain el Guderat, Kossaima, Muweilleh,
and Ain Kadeis. The similarity between the names Kadeis and Kadesh need not
be a mere coincidence, for the former is just as likely to be of ancient as
of recent origin. The extension by the Israelites of what is now the name
of a small isolated valley to a whole district can be explained by the fact
that travellers coming from Akaba would happen first on the low country at
that valley's mouth, a country less detestable than the wastes they had
just left, and might easily, as strangers, call the whole plain after their
first watering-place. On the other hand, the assumption, necessary to our
minds, that the place-name was extended to a district embracing other and
better water-sources, undermines the identification of Ain Kadeis valley as
the scene of events related as happening at Kadesh. These may have taken
place anywhere in the Kossaima neighbourhood. We are told that at one well
in Kadesh the Israelites found the water insufficient - and if there were
more than twenty families of them, and the spring were the present Ain
Kadeis, then their complaints must be considered moderate. Thereupon Moses
produced the water of Meribah, so called to distinguish it from the first
well. Certainly it is useless to look for this copious fount in the barren
gorge of Ain Kadeis, unless we suppose that it dried up as miraculously as
it appeared. At a later date Moses, writing to the King of Edom, described
Kadesh as `a city in the uttermost of thy border' (Numbers xx, 16). The
word `city' is a vague one, and probably only means a settlement, perhaps a
district, like the modern Arabic beled which is used to mean town, village,
district, or country. In the former sense it might be used of such
hut-settlements as those of Muweilleh and Kossaima; but would most
temptingly apply to the fortress of Ain Guderat, should we assume - we
cannot prove it - that the fort was already built when Moses came.
Strategically the Kossaima district agrees well with what we know of
Kadesh-Barnea. The Darb el Shur, the road of their forefathers, stretching
westwards before the eyes of the mutinous Israelites, suggested an easy
return to Egypt (Numbers xiv, 4); the same road runs northwards to Hebron,
whither the spies went up to view the Land of Promise (Numbers xiii, 21).
From the south runs up the main road from Elath, one of the stations on the
Exodus route. Westwards there is a choice of roads; one can go either
through Bit Hafir and the Abda district by what is now called the Darb el
Sultan, the King's Highway, into the Araba, or by way of Wady Lussan, a
little to the south, to Bit Mayein, (Very carefully examined by Pere
Jaussen in the Revue Biblique, July, 1906, with a sketch map, and a good
description of the way.) and thence by the Jerafi wady system to sundry
roads leading into the Araba directly in front of Jebel Harun, the
traditional Mount Hor. To choose today out of the innumerable hills of the
country one particular peak to be the scene of Aaron's burial shows,
perhaps, an uncatholic mind; but as long as the tradition of Jebel Harun
passes muster, so long the existence of recognized roadways between the
mountain and the Kossaima plain must influence our judgment. These roads
running out to north, south, east and west - all directions in which
journeys were planned or made from Kadesh-Barnea - together with its
abundance of water and wide stretch of tolerable soil, distinguish the
Kossaima plain from any other district in the Southern Desert, and may well
mark it out as the headquarters of the Israelites during their forty years
of discipline.
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