over eastern Palestine. A cromlech is a heap of stones roughly resembling a pyramid;1 a menhir is a group of unhewn stones so set in the earth as to stand upright like columns;2 a dolmen consists of a large unhewn stone which rests on two others which separate it from the earth; and a "gilgal" is a group of menhirs set in a circle.2 These monuments are the remains of men of the stone age who dwelt here before the dawn of history. They were probably erected by some of those peoples whom the Hebrews called Rephaim or "shades"-people who, having lived long before, were dead at the time of the Hebrew occupation. Similar monuments of the stone age have been found in Japan, India, Persia, the Caucasus, the Crimea, Bulgaria; also in Tripoli,5 Tunis, Algeria, Morocco, Malta, southern Italy, Sardinia, Corsica, the Belearic Isles, Spain, Portugal, France, the British Isles, Scandinavia, and the German shores of the Baltic. Some scholars hold that all these monuments were made by one race of men, who migrated from country to country. As the monuments are not found at very great distances from the sea, the migrations are supposed to have followed the sea coasts. Others scout the idea of a migration over such long distances at such an early epoch of the world's history, and believe that the fashion of making such monuments was adopted from people to people by imitation. Be this as it may, these monuments seem to have been in Egypt and Palestine before the Semites and Hamites developed into the Egyptians, Amorites, and Hebrews, for they were adopted by them as the "pillars" which are so often denounced in the Old Testament, and in Egypt were gradually shaped and prolonged into the obelisks. Of the men of this stone age the excavations have furnished us with some further information. At Gezer the native rock below all the cities was found to contain caves, some natural and some artificial, which had formed the dwellings of men of the stone age. They, like men today, were lazy. If one found a cave that would protect him from heat, cold, and rain, he would occupy it and save 1 See Barton, A Year's Wandering in Bible Lands, Philadelphia, 1904, p. 143. 2 See Barton, in the Biblical World, Chicago, 1904, Vol. XXIV, p. 177. 3 See Conder, Survey of Eastern Palestine, I, pp. 125-277, and Mackenzie in the Annual of the Palestine Exploration Fund, I, pp. 5-11. 4 See Gen. 14: 5; 15: 20. See H. S. Cowper, The Hill of the Graces, a Record of Investigation among the Trilithons and Megalithic Sites of Tripoli, London, 1897, and Brandenburg, Über Felsarchitektur im Mittelmeergebiet in Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft, 1914. 6 See the Annals of Archæology and Anthropology, Vol. V, Liverpool, 1913, pp. 112-128. 7 See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, 72–152. himself the trouble of making one. But there were not enough caves to go around, so some of the men of ancient Gezer cut caves for themselves out of the soft limestone rock. It must have been a difficult task with the stone implements at their disposal, but they accomplished it, sometimes cutting stairs by which to descend into them. One such cave seems to have been used by them as a temple. In it were found a quantity of pig bones, which were apparently the remains of their sacrifices. If they offered the pig in sacrifice, they were certainly not Semitic, for Semites abhorred swine. These early men sometimes adorned the sides of their dwellings by scratching pictures on the walls. Several pictures of cattle were found. One cow seemed to have knobs on her horns to keep her from goring! One drawing represented a stag that was being killed with a bow and arrow. These early men burned their dead, and one of the caves in the eastern end of the hill was used as their crematory. Steps in the rock led down to its entrance. The cave itself was 31 feet long, 24 feet 6 inches wide, and the height varied from 2 to 5 feet. Near one end a hole had been cut to the upper air to act as a flue. Below this the fires that burned their dead had been kindled; cinders and charred bones of these far-off men were found as grim tokens of their funeral rites. Shortly after these bones were found the anatomist, Prof. Alexander Macalister, of Cambridge University, father of the excavator, visited the camp at Gezer and made a study of the bones. He found that they represented a nonSemitic race. The peculiar modifications of the bones caused by the squatting so universally practised by Semites were absent. The men whose bones these were could not have been more than 5 feet 6 inches in height, and many of the women must have been as short as 5 feet 3 inches. A pottery head found in one of the caves, which may be a rude portrait of the type of face seen in Gezer in this period, has a sloping forehead, which afforded little brain-space, and a prominent lower jaw. These people used flint knives, crushed their grain in hollow stones with rounded stones, employed a variety of stone implements, and made pottery of a rude type, which will be described in a later chapter. The city of Gezer in this cave-dwelling period was surrounded by a unique wall or rampart.2 This consisted of a stone wall about 6 feet high and 2 feet thick, on the outer side of which was a ram 1 See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, 145–152. part of packed earth about 6 feet 6 inches at the base and sloping toward the top. This bank of earth was protected by a covering of small stones about 8 inches in depth. This rampart never could have been of much value in warfare, and was, perhaps, meant as a protection against incursions of wild animals. In the hillsides around Gezer there are many caves which were probably human habitations during this period, but as they have been open during many centuries, traces of their early occupation have long since been destroyed. At Beit Jibrin, six or eight hours to the south of Gezer, there are also many caves in the rock, numbers of which are artificial. At various periods these have been employed as residences. It is altogether probable that the use of some of them goes back to the time of the cave-dwellers of Gezer. Mr. Macalister has suggested a connection between these cavedwellers of Gezer and the Biblical Horites,1 since Horite means "cave-dweller." In the Bible the Horites are said to have dwelt to the east of the Jordan, and more especially in Edom (Gen. 14:6; 36:20, 21, 29; Deut. 2:12, 22). It seems probable that the reason why the Bible places them all beyond Jordan is that the cave-dwellers had disappeared from western Palestine centuries before the Hebrews came, while to the east of the Jordan they lingered on until displaced by those who were more nearly contemporary with the Hebrews. On the west of the Jordan megalithic monuments were probably once numerous, since traces of them still survive in Galilee and Judæa,2 but later divergent civilizations have removed most of them. In the time of Amos one of these "gilgals" was used by the Hebrews as a place of worship, of which the prophet did not approve.3 It seems probable that there was a settlement of these cavedwellers at Jerusalem. The excavations of Capt. Parker brought to light an extensive system of caves around the Virgin's Fountain, Ain Sitti Miriam, as the Arabs call it, which is the Biblical Gihon.1 These caves are far below the present surface of the ground. It was found, too, that there would be no spring at this point at all, if some early men had not walled up the natural channel in the rock down which the water originally ran. These men, judging by the fragments of pottery and the depth of the débris, belonged 1 R. A. S. Macalister, Bible Side-lights from the Mound of Gezer, London, 1906, Chapter II. 2 See P. E. Mader in Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins, Vol. XXXVII, 1914, pp. 20–44. See Amos 4:4; 5: 5. 4 See Dr. Masterman, in Biblical World, XXXIX, 301, f. |