The Public,
However, Has Never Received Any More Than A Very Short Account Of These
Journeys, Taken From The Correspondence
Of M. Seetzen with M. de Zach,
at Saxe-Gotha.[This correspondence having been communicated to the
Palestine Association, was
Translated and printed by that Society in the
year 1810, in a quarto of forty-seven pages.] He was quite unsuccessful
in his inquiries for Petra, and having taken the road which leads to
Mount Sinai [p.vi]from Hebron, he had no suspicion of the existence of
the long valley known by the names of El Ghor, and El Araba.
This prolongation of the valley of the Jordan, which completes a
longitudinal separation of Syria, extending for three hundred miles from
the sources of that river to the eastern branch of the Red Sea, is a
most important feature in the geography of the Holy Land,--indicating
that the Jordan once discharged itself into the Red Sea, and confirming
the truth of that great volcanic convulsion, described in the nineteenth
chapter of Genesis, which interrupted the course of the river, which
converted into a lake the fertile plain occupied by the cities of Adma,
Zeboin, Sodom and Gomorra, and which changed all the valley to the
southward of that district into a sandy desert.
The part of the valley of the Orontes, below Hamah, in which stood the
Greek cities of Larissa and Apameia, has now for the first time been
examined by a scientific traveller, and the large lake together with the
modern name of Famia, which have so long occupied a place in the maps of
Syria, may henceforth be erased.
The country of the Nabataei, of which Petra was the chief town, is well
characterized by Diodorus,[Diod. Sic.l.2,c.48.] as containing some
fruitful spots, but as being for the greater part, desert and waterless.
With equal accuracy, the combined information of Eratosthenes,
[Eratosth. ap. Strab. p.767.] Strabo,[Strabo, p.779.] and Pliny, [Plin.
Hist Nat.l.6,c.28.] describes Petra as falling in a line, drawn from the
head of the Arabian gulf (Suez) to Babylon,--as being at the distance of
three or four days from Jericho, and of four or five from Phoenicon,
which was a place now called Moyeleh, on the Nabataean coast, near the
entrance of the AElanitic gulf,--and as situated in a valley of about
two miles in length surrounded with deserts, inclosed within precipices,
and watered by a river. The latitude of 30 degrees 20 minutes
[p.vii]ascribed by Ptolemy to Petra, agrees moreover very accurately
with that which is the result of the geographical information of
Burckhardt. The vestiges of opulence, and the apparent date of the
architecture at Wady Mousa, are equally conformable with the remains of
the history of Petra, found in Strabo,[P.781.] from whom it appears that
previous to the reign of Augustus, or under the latter Ptolemies, a very
large portion of the commerce of Arabia and India passed through Petra
to the Mediterranean:
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