Chapter VI: Part 6

It is often urged that the sub-structures known as Solomon's stables, in the south-east corner of the Haram, are of too slight a construction to bear the cloisters of the temple, and too modern, as well as too slight;[34] but the floor of these vaults is on a level with the six feet course of stones previously mentioned--above which level few stones remain _in situ_--and any previous sub-structures would not have survived the destruction of the east and south retaining walls. Between the Triple Gate and the south-east angle is the postern known as the Single Gate, with its sill on a level with the sill of the Triple Gate, but itself of modern construction. Below this gate, and below the vaults within the Haram, at this corner, Warren discovered a passage for carrying into the Kedron some liquid, and yet wholly distinct from the water channels under the Triple Gate. Underground Jerusalem so abounds in aqueducts and passages that it would not be of much force to urge that this channel conveyed the blood from the altar: yet the suggestion may be set against any similar one in favour of another site.

Finally, on this point, at the south-east angle, which some had thought to be modern, the foundations are about eighty feet beneath the surface, the stones are _in situ_, and some of them have Phoenician masons' marks painted and chiselled on them. That the stones are _in situ_ is proved by the circumstance that a small depth of _débris_, which had been shovelled away to make room for the lowest tier, still remains close by, and has its layers _sloping inwards_. That the wall is ancient is thought to be evidenced by the Phoenician characters, which seem certainly to point to pre-Roman times, and possibly to the time when Solomon engaged the workmen of Hiram, King of Tyre, to build the temple.

Still, neither is the evidence conclusive here. While the stones at the north-east angle differ from those at the south-east, and there are several breaks and irregularities in the masonry of the east wall, Phoenician marks--though too much blurred to be deciphered--are found at the north-east angle also; the south-east angle is not a right angle, but measures 92 deg. 5 min. at the surface, and 92 deg. 25 min. at the foundation; at 105 feet from the corner there is a break in the character of the masonry; only the first 120 feet of wall are in the same straight line, and then there is a bend to the north-east.

The platform, called the Haram area, is nearly on one level all over, and near its centre is a second platform, about eighteen feet higher, on which stands the Mosque of Omar, covering the Sakhra, or sacred rock of the Mahometans, which measures sixty feet by fifty or fifty-five, and is said by them to be a morsel of Paradise. Thrupp and Falconer suppose it to be the rock or part of the rock on which stood the tower of Antonia; Fergusson maintains it to be the Holy Sepulchre, over which Constantine built a church, and Professor Willis identifies it with the threshing-floor of Araunah, and therefore with the site of the temple. As this rock is the highest point of Mount Moriah, and contains a cave with an opening to a deeper recess which has not been explored, it was sure thus to suggest itself as the place of the altar whence, according to the Talmud, the blood and offal of the sacrifices were drained off to the Kedron. As excavations have not been permitted within the sacred area, it has not been possible to put this theory to any test; nor can Warren's accidental discovery of souterrains along the northern edge of the platform, and of a natural or artificial ditch crossing beyond its north-west corner, be considered as settling the point either way. It may be worth a thought that the summit of Moriah may have been a 'high place' for heathen worship before it occurred to David to build a temple for God; that on that very account it would perhaps be _avoided_ by the builders of the temple; and that if Araunah worshipped on any high place at all, his threshing-floor would not be on the same spot.

Captain Warren is never forward to theorise, but as a provisional hypothesis during his earlier excavations he favoured the south-east angle as the probable site of the temple; and now, after three or four years of investigation, while he has come to no conclusion, he inclines to a position nearly coincident with the Dome-of-Rock platform. As Josephus states the stones in Solomon's Cloister--the eastern side of the temple--to have been twenty cubits long and six cubits high, and Warren has not found any stones of these dimensions at any point where he has explored, he naturally thinks the cloister may be in the part he has not explored, viz., a space of 600 feet between the Golden Gate and the south-east angle, where a wide Mahometan cemetery makes operations very difficult.

'Place the temple here, nearly coinciding with the
Dome-of-the Rock Platform, and it appears to suit exactly.
It has the valley to the north; it has the raised platform
of the dome of the rock, which is just about the height of
the inner court above the outer; it has the unexplored 600
feet of wall south of the Golden Gate, and overlooking the
Kedron. But it will be asked, "What about the south-east
angle, with its sub-structures and its walls, with
Phoenician characters inscribed thereon?" I think it was
Solomon's palace.'

One of the objects of the Palestine Exploration Fund is to improve our knowledge of Jewish archæology, about which we have known next to nothing. The discoveries in Assyria show us what may be expected; 'for not only have we been able (says Mr. Layard) through the discoveries of Sir Henry Rawlinson, Dr. Hincks, and others (Mr. Layard might have added his own name), to read their written history, and trace their connection with other nations and races, but by the aid of the sculptures we can almost learn the details of the private and domestic life of the Assyrian people--their dress, their arms, and their religious ceremonies.' If similar discoveries could be made in Palestine, the greatest light would be thrown upon the political and domestic history of the Jews, and most important illustrations of the Holy Scriptures would be obtained. Such discoveries are indeed considered unlikely, since the Jewish law forbade the representation of the human form in sculpture or painting; but the Jews did not always scrupulously observe their law; besides which, the objection does not relate to the discovery of pottery, glass, coins, metal work, remains of architecture, &c. It must be confessed, indeed, that the legendary golden throne of King Solomon, with its eagles, and lions, and doves, has not been found, and the sceptres of the kings of Judah and Israel have not even been searched for by the explorers; moreover, most of their labour has been expended in uncovering massive structures, which cannot be brought home; yet still, when Mr. Macgregor returned from Jerusalem, he brought with him nine cases of objects incidentally lighted upon by the excavators, and in the summer of 1869 the Society was able to open a Museum of Palestinean Antiquities. The collection included lamps, pottery, glass, coins, weapons, tesselated pavement, sculpture, sarcophagi, geological specimens, and a collection of stone weights; besides photographs, and tracings, maps, and models. Three glass lamps, of curious construction, with several brigs of red pottery, and a cooking dish, glazed inside, were found in the rock-cut chambers and passages leading from the Virgin's Fountain up through the hill of Ophel. The whole of the ground of Ophel, between the south Haram wall and the Pool of Siloam, has been built over, and lamps of a particular type have been found there--two of them with Greek inscriptions--and in no case has any known Arabic pottery been found. On the other hand, at the Birket Israil--so-called Pool of Bethesda, where Warren dug through thirty-five feet of rubbish, and brought up a piece of the concrete bottom--the pottery is totally different. It is in many cases highly glazed, and has patterns on it, and when it is unglazed it has bands of red or brown, or other marks, very similar in appearance to the specimens of pottery found at Athens and Melos; and yet among this there came to light two pieces of glazed jars with raised Arabic or Cufic inscriptions, one of them being the usual invocation to Allah.

Some of the pottery found is older than the south-east portion of the Haram wall, for on the rock there rests an accumulation of eight or ten feet of a clay mould, which, from its slope, appears to have been cut through for the purpose of laying the stones on a solid foundation, and this clay abounds in pottery, broken into fragments. The rock at the south-east angle is very soft for the first two or three feet of depth, and at three feet to the east of the angle a hole was found scooped out of it, one foot in diameter and one foot in depth, in which was a little earthenware jar, standing upright, as though it had been purposely placed there. Warren suggested at the time (February, 1869) that the purpose may have been religious or superstitious, and that in such cases inscriptions might be found upon the pottery, if the jars were properly cleaned. The suggestion has borne fruit in his own experience. Among the fragments of pottery which for a depth of about two inches covers the rich loam overlying the rock at the south-east angle some handles of jars were observed to have a stamp on them, and on this account some specimens were collected. After his return to England, in 1870, Captain Warren, getting these out, and dusting the mud off them, observed Phoenician letters, some of which have since been read by Dr. Birch, of the British Museum, as _lemelek Zepha_ (to the king Zepha), and which exactly resemble those of the Moabite stone, of which all the world has heard. The significance of this discovery will be better understood after we have considered that of the Moabite stone itself.

The paleographical results achieved by the Palestine Exploration Fund, when viewed by the side of the many and varied works in other departments, may seem to be small; but Mr. Deutsch, when speaking at Oxford,[35] was not wrong in desiring his hearers to count the latter, but to weigh the former. In a minaret near Nablus, immured upside down, is an inscribed slab that once belonged to a synagogue, which, though it does not seem to have been seen by Robinson, was copied by Shultz in 1844, and published by Rödiger; and again copied by Wildenbruck, and published by Blau. Finally, in 1860, it was copied and explained by Rosen, whose work left that of his predecessors far behind. Yet even he does not give all the characters, nor are they so accurately reproduced as would seem to be absolutely necessary in the case of the oldest known Samaritan monument; nor has he been able more than to conjecture as to the reading of the very beginning of the tablet. A photograph, taken under Captain Wilson, has rendered everything clear, and it turns out that, owing to the difficulty of the position in which the decipherer is necessarily placed, it was utterly impossible to perceive certain marks on the stone itself which are quite clear in the photograph. The tablet itself exhibits ten lines, the first eight of which contain the Ten Commandments, according to the Samaritan recension, in an abbreviated form. The ninth forms a portion of the celebrated Samaritan interpolation after the Ten Commandments (from Deut. xxvii. 2--7; and ix. 30)--'And it shall be on the day when ye shall pass over Jordan ... on Mount Gerizim ... _and thou shalt build there an altar unto the Lord thy God_.' The last line contains the formula from Exodus, of frequent use in Samaritan worship, viz., 'Arise, O Lord; return, O Lord!'[36] Another photograph gives the famous inscription on the lintel of a ruined synagogue at Kefr Birim, in Galilee, with greater clearness than is represented in M. Renan's lithograph, taken from a cast, and is even clearer than the original itself, certain blurred characters of which it was next to impossible to distinguish on the glaring white surface. The gist of the inscription is a prayer for 'peace upon this place and all the places of Israel,' and an indication of the builder's name. In addition to these, some dozens of inscriptions have been copied--in the north of Palestine by Wilson; at Jerash and in the Lebanon by Warren; and in the Haram area and elsewhere by Mr. E. H. Palmer. Ancient characters have been ferreted out, and copied from the walls of Sidon; and a seal, bearing the inscription, 'Haggai, son of Shebaniah,' and dating as far back as the Maccabean period, has been found under the buried pavement near the south-west corner of the Haram. The red-paint characters at the south-east angle of the Haram were examined by Mr. Deutsch on the spot, and pronounced to be partly letters, partly numerals, and partly special masons' or quarry signs. Some of them were recognisable at once as well-known Phoenician characters; others, hitherto unknown in Phoenician epigraphy, Mr. Deutsch had the rare satisfaction of being able to identify on absolutely undoubted antique Phoenician structures in Syria, such as the primitive sub-structures of the harbour at Sidon. Similar marks at the north-east angle afford evidence that the stones of the Haram wall were shaped at the quarry, inasmuch as the paint in one instance has run, and the trickling is upwards with reference to the present position of the stone. Evidence to the same effect is furnished by the marginal drafts, which, present no appearance of pattern or design when the wall is regarded as a whole, but only when each stone is taken by itself.

The paleographic discovery of paramount interest is that of the Moabite stone, with a memorial inscription in what is known to scholars as the 'Phoenician' character, and belonging, there is little doubt, to the first half of the ninth century B.C. In August, 1868, the Rev. F. A. Klein, a Prussian clergyman, in the service of the Church Missionary Society at Jerusalem, in the course of a journey from es-Salt to Kerak, had the good fortune to be shown this monument at Dhibân near Arnon, the old border of Moab. The stone was lying among the ruins, perfectly free and exposed to view, the inscription uppermost, and was in excellent preservation. Mr. Klein ascertained it to be one metre thirteen centimetres in height, seventy centimetres in breadth and thirty-five in thickness, rounded at the upper and lower corners,[37] and containing thirty-four lines of writing. Circumstances prevented his copying more than 'a few words from several lines at random;' and when afterwards M. Clermont-Ganneau, of the French Consulate at Jerusalem, Captain Warren, of the Palestine Exploration Fund, and others, interested themselves to obtain 'squeezes,' the Arabs resented the action of foreigners, quarrelled among themselves, and lighting a fire about the stone poured water on it and broke it to pieces. An Arab employed by M. Ganneau, who when the quarrel arose was engaged in taking a squeeze, tore off the wet impression in rags, and springing on his horse managed to escape, though not without a spear wound in his leg. Through the energy of Captain Warren and M. Ganneau better squeezes were afterwards obtained of the larger fragments, and at a later date the fragments themselves came to hand, so that of 1,000 letters which it is estimated the stone contained, 669 have been recovered.

While the materials remain imperfect, it is impossible to obtain a complete translation of the inscription, though various attempts have been made. M. Ganneau's second translation of June, 1870, differs widely from that which he put forth five months previously; but then his only copy of certain parts of the stone was certain torn rags (_lambeaux frifés et chiffonnés_), and his method of procedure with the fragments of the stone is thus described:--'La plus grande partie de ces morceaux, même les plus minimes, peut être mise en place facilement, en tenant compte de la correspondance horizontale et verticale des séries de caractères: il suffit de procéder comme pour déterminer la position géographique d'un point par l'intersection des lignes de longitude et de latitude.'[38] Translations have also been attempted by Professor Schlottman, of Halle, Professor Nöldeke, and in this country by Dr. Neubauer; while Mr. Deutsch has consistently asked scholars and the public to exercise patience and wait till the full materials for a translation should come to hand. The general drift of the inscription, however, is clear enough. It appears to be a contemporaneous record from the Moabite point of view of 2 Kings i. 1, set up by King Mesha, commencing with a brief record of himself and his father, commemorating warlike successes over the Israelites, explaining how he rebuilt and improved a number of well-known Moabite cities, and finishing apparently with some further reference to war. The names of Israel, Omri, Chemosh, occur up and down, and the monarch seems to have conceived himself under the special guidance of his god, who was thought to signify his will that this or that city should be attacked, and who was obeyed implicitly. Historically, therefore, the monument is interesting, since it is an unexpected record of a nation now passed away, and adds a trifle to our knowledge.

Paleographically, the stone is of far greater value, and happily of nearly as much value in its mutilated condition, as it would have been if perfect. It is the very oldest Semitic lapidary record of importance yet discovered, the most ancient specimen of the alphabetic writing still in common use amongst us--a century and a half earlier than any other inscription in the same Phoenician character, and three centuries earlier than any other such inscription of any length. Its significance in this respect is, however, only in process of being studied, and uniformity of opinion has not yet been arrived at. The names of the Hebrew letters are all significant of certain objects--_aleph_, _bêth_, _gimel_, _daleth_, for instance = ox, house, camel, door, &c.; and it has been maintained by Semitic scholars that the letters themselves were originally slight and abridged representations of the visible objects, the resemblance being more clearly seen in the older Phoenician than in the later Phoenician, the Assyrian or square character, and archaic Greek.[39] Mr. Deutsch, who was so careful in the matter of translation, was bold to express himself here, and to assert from the evidence of the Moabite stone that 'the more primitive the characters the _simpler_ they become; not, as often supposed, the more complicated, as more in accordance with some pictorial prototype.'[40] This view is controverted by Professor Rawlinson, in the _Contemporary Review_ for August, 1870, and, as it appears to us, successfully; for while the later characters in some instances present a greater complication to the eye, they are far simpler to the mind as soon as you imagine yourself engaged in writing them and exerting the volition separately for each stroke. 'In _samech_ for instance, apparently the most complicated of the later letters, a gradual diminution in the number of strokes may be traced from first to last. Originally the letter was written like an early Greek _xi_--thus, [hand printed character], with four distinct strokes; then the four were reduced to two by changing the three horizontal bars into a zigzag, which could be written without taking the hand from the paper, and adding a vertical bar beneath it; finally, the vertical bar was attached to one end of the zigzag, and thus made a continuation of it, so that a single continuous stroke sufficed for the whole letter.... In like manner, the original _zain_ required three distinct strokes, two horizontal and one oblique ([hand printed character]), which were subsequently represented by the form still in use (Z), a form producible by a single effort, without any removal of the pen from the paper.'

And so with regard to the pictorial origin of the letters. The early _bêth_ differs from the later solely in having a pointed head instead of a rounded one. But the object which _bêth_ was intended to represent was a tent, the earliest 'house' of pastoral man; and this had in primitive times the simple triangular form, (Delta). Thus the early _bêth_ more resembled the object than the later one. The early _daleth_ is a simple triangle; the later has the right side of the triangle elongated, and the other two generally rounded into one. But _daleth_, 'door,' represented the opening of a tent, the form of which was like that of the tent, triangular. For other instances we must refer our readers to Professor Rawlinson's paper and the plate which accompanies it, merely remarking in the way of adverse criticism that the square letters of the Old Testament present a difficulty, since, while they are confessedly of later origin, such letters as _bêth_, _gimel_, _zain_, _ain_, _kaph_, _shin_, are less simple in the sense explained, than the older. The Moabite stone also throws light on the question of the time at which writing was introduced into Greece, the Greek alphabet of the earliest inscriptions (circ. B.C. 650-500) resembling that of the Moabite stone more closely than it does any later alphabet; so that Mr. Grote's opinion that letters were unknown to the Greeks of Homer's time, and Hesiod's, is in danger of being proved incorrect.

It is remarkable that a stone measuring three feet six inches in length and with thirty-four lines of writing on it should have escaped notice until the year 1868; but since Irby and Mangles visited Moab in 1809, scarcely any European traveller has passed near the spot where this monument was found; so that it has been said that the chief value of this discovery is in the prospect it affords of future successful exploration. It should be remembered that the Arabs are now aware of the price Europeans are willing to pay for such relics, and would no doubt bring others forward if they knew of any existing. Mr. E. H. Palmer, who was in the country in the spring of 1870, is probably right in his conclusion that above ground at least there does not exist another Moabite stone. But there are more fishes in the sea than have ever yet been caught; and if a few intelligent men accustomed to dealing with lawless Arabs could be sent out to Moab to conduct excavations, they might, if liberally supplied with money and other resources, obtain antiquities of great value, inscriptions possibly included. Dean Stanley points us also to 1 Sam. xv. 12, describing Saul's victory over the Amalekites, where it is said, 'Saul came to Carmel, and behold he set him up a place' ([Hebrew character] which is from the root [Hebrew character], _to set_, _to put_; in the Hiphil to make to stand, and which might be translated _pillar_ or _trophy_)--the Dean points to this to show the possibility of even Jewish inscriptions coming to light.

To return to the characters at the south-east angle of the Haram--on the wall and on the handles of the jars or vases. The letters on the pottery are like those of the Moabite stone; whence the age of the jars is inferred to be about the same, and their origin Phoenician: the position of the pottery shows it to be of nearly the same age as the wall, and hence the antiquity of the wall is deduced; the wall itself shows Phoenician marks, and so the builders are believed to have been Phoenicians. This seems to us a little too hasty. The Moabite stone gives us the _Moabite_ alphabet of King Mesha's time, which proves to be identical with that of old Phoenicia. Judea was geographically as near to Phoenicia as Moab was, and probably used the same alphabet, a supposition confirmed by the discovery of vase handles at Jerusalem with letters like those of the Moabite stone. It seems gratuitous to conclude that these vases were among the contents of a museum or were ever the property of Phoenicians, when the evidence goes to show that the language inscribed on them was common to all the races of Western Asia. Only for want of a better name has it been called 'Phoenician;' and Mr. Deutsch had already suggested the term 'Cadmean,' while Sir Henry Rawlinson had ventured the prediction that, should any early monument be found at Jerusalem, its inscription would be in this character. The Phoenician character was probably the only cursive character used by the Semitic nations, and the Hebrew character, Sir Henry believes, did not exist till after the return from the captivity. The vase handles therefore show us the kind of letters used by the Hebrew prophets, and the Cadmean masons' marks neither prove nor disprove the Phoenician origin of the Haram wall; but the identity of the vase-handle letters with those of the Moabite stone rather than with the alphabet of Assyrian tablets and gems, or of the inscription on the tomb of Eshmunazer (circ. B.C. 600) indicates the great antiquity both of the pottery and the south-east Haram wall. On this point we may add that we have compared (from the photographs) the letters of the vase-handles with those of the Moabite stone, and find the identity very apparent in the case of the _tau_, _shin_, _kaph_ and _mem_.

The work promised by the Fund in the departments of natural history and geology still waits for want of means; though notes have been made on the occurrence of basalt, trap, hot springs, &c., and among the things sent home have been an occasional animal, a small collection of _Coleoptera_, a book of dried flowers from Moab, and some specimens of rock. In its zoology and botany, as well as in its human history and arts, Palestine has felt the influence of Africa, Asia and Europe; the heights of Lebanon and Hermon, the depths of Gennesareth and the Dead Sea, assist to make its natural history cosmopolitan. It is curious that the _Clarias_, a strange-looking fish of the Siluroid family, found by Tristram in the Lake of Galilee, and in one of the fountains near its shores, should be identical in species with a fish found in the Nile; thus far confirming Josephus, who says that the fountain of Capharnaum in Gennesareth produced a Nile fish, and on that account was thought to be a vein of the river of Egypt.[41] But the words of Linnæus are almost true to-day: 'We know more of the botany and zoology of farther India than we do of those of Palestine.' Of the geology we are in equal ignorance, although the depression of the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea invites attention as being the most remarkable on the face of the globe, and constituting, in the opinion of Sir R. Murchison, the key to the entire geology of the district. Mr. Prestwich, Mr. Tristram, and a few other gentlemen, if sent out and supported for some years, would probably astonish us by the results of their investigations. In meteorology the Society has made a commencement, by sending out instruments and publishing tabular statements of barometrical readings, temperature, rainfall, &c., observed at Beyrout, Nazareth, Gaza, Jaffa, and in the Lebanon. With all this work on hand, they have also begun the exploration of the Tih--the Wilderness of the Wanderings--sending out Mr. E. H. Palmer, a most accomplished Arabic scholar, formerly of the Sinai Ordnance Survey, who appears to have made some discoveries, but whose full statement is not yet before us.

We had intended to detail the difficulties under which the explorers have done their work, but the list is too long: counting every shade, from the laziness of the native workmen, to the whizzing of native bullets; from the thermometer at 110 degrees to attacks of fever and dysentery; from slips in scaling mountains, danger from falling stones, risk of choking in narrow aqueducts and sewers--we had noted not less than fifty instances.

We are bound to say that the Society has made a good beginning; that it has done fully as much as could be expected under all the circumstances, and with its inadequate funds; and that if it be not well supported for another five years it will be to the lasting disgrace of England. In its scientific and its religions aims, in its practical and its unsectarian character, it suits the present age; supplying facts for theorists, illustrating points of Scripture history, and confirming the general truth of the Bible.

Besides the completion of the work at Jerusalem, much remains to be done, not only in natural history and geology, but in the observation of manners and customs, exploration at other cities, such as Jezreel, Samaria, Hebron, Bethshan, Nazareth, and excavation of the mounds scattered over the face of the country. There will probably never be a better opportunity than the present: for the visit of the Prince of Wales to the Holy Land removed some prejudices, the Turkish Government is favourable to the enterprise, and the work is actually begun. We conclude this review of the work of the Palestine Exploration Fund by heartily endorsing the appeal of Mr. Deutsch at the annual meeting in 1869. 'We, as humble votaries of science, would, in the name of science, urge you to continue that in which both religion and science may join. And let me remind you of one thing. There are ruins enough in the City of Sorrows. _Do not add fresh ruins._ Do not leave there broken shafts, abandoned galleries; and let it not be told in Gath that this England, the richest, proudest, and most Bible-loving country in the world, undertook one of the greatest undertakings, and abandoned it--for want of money.'

ART. V.--_The Early Sieges of Paris. Les Comtes de Paris; Histoire de l'Avènement de la Troisième Race._ Par ERNEST MOURIN. Paris: Didier et Cie.

_Robert der Tapfere, Markgraf von Anjou, der Stammvater des Kapetingischen Hauses._ Von Dr. Phil. KARL VON KALCKSTEIN. Berlin: Löwenstein.

The events of the last few months have, in a special way, drawn the thoughts of men towards two cities which stand out among European capitals as witnesses of the way in which the history of remote times still has its direct bearing on things which are passing before our own eyes. Rome and Paris now stand out, as they have stood out in so many earlier ages, as the historic centres of a period which, there can be no doubt, will live to all time as one of the marked periods of the world's history. And it is not the least wonderful phænomenon of this autumn of wonders that, while our eyes have been drawn at once to Rome and to Paris, they have been drawn far more steadily and with far keener interest towards Paris than they have been drawn towards Rome. We can hardly doubt, whether we look back to the past or onwards to the future, that the fall of the Pope's temporal power is really a greater event than any possible result of the war between Germany and France. Yet such is the greater immediate interest of the present struggle, such perhaps is the instinctive attraction of mankind towards the more noisy and brilliant triumphs of the siege and the battle-field, that the really greater event, simply because of the ease with which it has happened, has passed almost unnoticed in the presence of the lesser. The world has seen the Papacy in several shapes; but the shape of a Pontiff, spiritually infallible, but politically a subject, and the subject not of an universal Emperor but of a mere local King, is something which the world has not seen before. What may come of it, no man can say; but we may be pretty sure that greater things will come of it in one way or another, than can come out of any settlement, in whatever direction, of conflicting French and German interests. Still, at this moment, the present fate of Paris unavoidably draws to itself more of our thoughts than the future fate of Rome. But it is well to keep the two cities together before our eyes, and all the more so because the past history and the present position of those two cities have points in common which no other city in Europe shares with them in their fulness, which only one other city in Europe can claim to share with them in any degree.

The history of Rome, as all the world knows, is the history of a city which grew into an Empire. It grew in truth into a twofold, perhaps a more than twofold Empire. Out of the village on the Palatine sprang the Rome of the Cæsars and the Rome of the Pontiffs. From Rome came the language, the theology, the code of law, which have had such an undying effect on the whole European world. Amidst all changes, the city itself has been always clothed with a kind of mysterious and superstitious charm, and its possession has carried with it an influence which common military and political considerations cannot always explain. And from the Old Rome on the Tiber many of these attributes passed--some were even heightened in passing--to the new Rome on the Bosporos. From the days of Constantine till now, no man has ever doubted that, in the very nature of things, Constantinople, in whatever hands, must be the seat of empire. To Western eyes this seems mainly the result of her unrivalled geographical situation; over large regions of the East the New Rome wields the same magic influence which in the West has been wielded by the Old. _The_ City,[42] the City of the Cæsars, is in Christian eyes the one great object to be won; in Mahometan eyes it is the one great object to be kept. By the Bosporos, as by the Tiber, it is the city which has grown into the Empire, which has founded it, and which has sustained it.

Now of the other capitals of Europe--the capitals of the more modern states--one alone can claim to have been, in this way, the creator of the state of which it is now the head. Berlin, Madrid, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Saint Petersburg, are simply places chosen in later times, for reasons of caprice or convenience, as administrative centres of states which already existed. Vienna has grown from the capital of a Duchy into the capital of something which calls itself an Empire; but Vienna, as a city, has had nothing to do with the growth of that so-called Empire. London may fairly claim a higher place than any of the cities of which we have spoken. It was only by degrees, and after some fluctuations, that London, rather than Winchester, came to be permanently acknowledged as the capital of England. London won its rank, partly by virtue of an unrivalled military and commercial position, partly as the reward of the unflinching patriotism of its citizens in the Danish wars. But London in no way formed England, or guided her destinies. The history of London is simply that the city was found to be the most fitting and worthy head of an already existing kingdom. But Paris has been what London has been, and something more. Paris, like London, earned her pre-eminence in Gaul by a gallant and successful resistance to the Scandinavian enemy. It was the great siege of Paris in the ninth century which made Paris the chief among the cities of Gaul, and its Count the chief among the princes of Gaul. Its position first marked it out for the rank of a local capital, and, through the way in which it used its position, it grew into the capital of a kingdom. But it did not, like London, simply grow into the capital of a kingdom already existing. The city created first the county, and then the kingdom, of which it was successively the head. Modern France, as distinguished both from Roman Gaul and from the Western Kingdom of the Karlings, grew out of this County of Paris; and of the County of Paris the city was not merely the centre, but the life and soul. The position of Paris in the earliest times is best marked, as in the case of all Gaulish cities, by its place in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. It was a city, not of the first, but of the second rank; the seat of a Bishop, but not the seat of a Metropolitan.[43] Lutetia Parisiorum held the usual rank of one of those head towns of Gaulish tribes which grew into Roman cities. But it never became the centre of one of the great ecclesiastical and civil divisions; it never reached the rank of Lyons, Narbonne, Vienne, or Trier. Twice before the ninth century, the discerning eye, first of a Roman and then of a Frankish master, seemed to mark out the city of the Seine for greater things. It was the beloved home of Julian; it was the city which Hlodwig at once fixed upon for the seat of his new dominion. But the greatness of Paris, as the earliest settled seat of the Frankish power, was not doomed to be lasting. Under the descendants of Hlodwig Paris remained a seat of royalty; but, among the fluctuations of the Merovingian kingdoms, it was only one seat of royalty among several. It was the peer of Soissons, Orleans, and Metz--all of them places which thus, in the new state of things, assumed a higher importance than had belonged to them in Roman times. But, as the Austrasian House of the Karlings grew, first as Mayors, and then as Kings, to the lordship of the whole Frankish realm, the importance of the cities of Western Gaul necessarily lessened. Paris reached its utmost point of insignificance in the days of Charles the Great, whom French legends have pictured as a French King, reigning in Paris as his royal city. Whatever importance it had, it seems to have derived from its neighbourhood to the revered sanctuary of St. Denis. By a strange accident, the first King of the new house--the house with which Paris was to wage a war of races and languages--died either in the city itself, or in the precinct of the great monastery beyond its walls. Pippin, returning from a successful campaign in Aquitaine, fell sick at Saintes; from thence he was carried to Tours to implore the help of Saint Martin, and thence to Paris to implore the help of Saint Denis. He died at Paris, and was buried in the great minster which became the burial-place of the next and rival line of kings.[44] But Paris was neither the crowning-place nor the dwelling-place of his son, nor was it the object of any special attention during his long reign. Of the two sons of Pippin, between whom his kingdom was immediately divided, Paris fell to the lot of Karlmann. But he chose Soissons for his crowning-place--the place where his father had been crowned before him.[45] Charles, crowned at Noyon, made Aachen his capital, and, in the course of his whole reign, he visited Paris only on a single progress, when it is incidentally mentioned among a long string of other cities.[46]

But this time of utter neglect was, in the history of Paris, only the darkness before the coming of the dawn. In the course of the next reign Paris begins to play an important part, and from that time the importance of the city steadily grew till it became what we have seen it in our own day. The occasional visits of Lewis the Pious to the city are dwelled on by his poetical biographer with evident delight, and with even more than usual pomp of words.[47]. And the city was now about to appear in its most characteristic; light. In the words of Sir Francis Palgrave, who has sketched the early history of Paris with great power and insight,[48] 'the City of Revolutions begins her real history by the first French Revolution.'[49] In this particular case we do not even grudge the premature use of the word 'French,' for the movement of which he speaks was plainly a movement of the Romanized lands of the West against their Teutonic master. Most likely no such feeling was consciously present to the mind of any man; but nations and parties seek to shape themselves unconsciously, and cities and regions learn to play their appropriate parts, before they can give any intelligible account of what they are doing. The Emperor was leading an expedition against the revolted Bretons; suddenly all the disaffected spirits of the Empire, his own sons among the foremost, gathered themselves together at Paris.[50] They then seized Lewis himself at Compiègne, and their hated step-mother Judith on the rock of Laon. But one part of his dominions was still faithful to the imprisoned Cæsar; the German lands had no share in the rebellion, and eagerly sought for the restoration of their sovereign. In marking out the geographical divisions of feeling, the writer of the ninth century, like those of the nineteenth, is driven, as it were, to forestal the language of a somewhat later time. The Emperor had no confidence in the French, but he put his trust in the German.[51]

Such was the part--a characteristic part--played by Paris in the Revolution of 830. Four years later Paris appears playing an opposite, yet a no less characteristic part. The Emperor Lewis, already restored and again deposed, is held as a prisoner by his eldest son Lothar, and is led in bonds to Paris.[52] Again the men of the East, the faithful Germans, are in arms for their sovereign under Lewis, at that moment his only loyal son. But by this time the city has changed sides. Lothar, for fear of the German host, flees to the South, leaving his father at liberty; the late captive is led by his rejoicing people to the minster of Saint Denis, and there is girt once more with the arms of the warrior and with the Imperial robes of the Cæsar.[53] Once then in the course of its long history, did Paris behold the inauguration of a lawful Emperor. But it was the re-inauguration of an Emperor whom one Parisian revolution had overthrown, and whom another Parisian revolution had set up again; and in the moment alike of his fall and of his restoration the force of loyal Germany forms at one time a threatening, at another an approving, background.

We thus see Paris, well-nigh unheard of during the reign of Charles the Great, suddenly rise into importance under his son. Under Charles the Bald its importance becomes greater still, and it begins to assume the peculiar function which raised it to the head place in Gaul. The special wretchedness of the time was fast showing the great military importance of the site. Under the rule of the Austrasian Mayors and Kings there had been endless wars, but they had been wars waged far away from Paris. Above all, no hostile fleet had for ages sailed up the Seine. Lutetia on her island must, under the Frankish power, have enjoyed for some generations a repose almost as unbroken as she had enjoyed in the days of the _Roman Peace_. Now all was changed. The Empire was torn in pieces by endless civil wars, wars of brother against brother, and the fleets of the Northmen, barely heard of in the days of Charles the Great, were making their way up the months of all its rivers. Men now began to learn that the island city, encompassed by the broad Seine, with its bridges and its minsters, and the Roman palace on the left bank, was at once among the most precious possessions and among the surest bulwarks of the realm. It is not without significance that the one time when the Great Charles himself visited Paris, it was in the course of a progress in which he had been surveying the shores of the Northern Ocean.[54] He came to Paris as a mourner and as a pilgrim, yet we may believe that neither his grief nor his devotion hindered him from marking the importance of the post. His eye surely marked the site as one fated to be the main defence, if not of his whole Empire, at least of its western portion, against the pirate-barks by which the Ocean was beginning to be covered. And probably it was not mere accident that it was in the course of an expedition against Brittany that Paris became the centre of the conspiracy of 830. In a Breton war, a land war, Paris would not be of the same pre-eminent importance as it was in the invasion of the Northmen. Still the island stronghold would be of no small moment in case of a Breton inroad, and in the days of Lewis the Pious a Breton inroad was again a thing to be dreaded. Among the troubles of the next reign the pre-eminent importance of Paris begins to stand out more and more strongly. By the last partition under Lewis the Pious, his youngest son, Charles the Bald, became King of a kingdom formed by the accidental union of Neustria and Aquitaine. The kingdom so formed answered to nothing which had been thought of in earlier divisions, but it answered in a kind of rough way to modern France. Far smaller as a whole, it took in districts at both ends, in Flanders and in Catalonia, which have long ceased to be looked upon as French. But it nowhere came near to the coveted frontier of the Rhine and the Alps. Of this kingdom it seemed at first that Paris was at once to become the capital; no other city filled so prominent a place in the early history of the reign of Charles the Bald. In the very beginning of his reign we find Charles making use of the position of the city and its bridge: to bar the progress of his brother, the Emperor Lothar. We find him dwelling for a long time in the city, and giving the citizens the delight of a spectacle by appearing among them in royal pomp at the Easter festival.[55] Four years later, the city began to appear in its other character as the great mark for Scandinavian attack. The northern pirates were now swarming on every sea, and the coasts of Britain, Gaul, and Germany were all alike desolated by their harryings. But they instinctively felt that, while no shore lay more temptingly for their objects than the shores of Northern Gaul, there was no point either of the insular or of the continental realm where their approach was better guarded against. The island city, with its two bridges and its strongly fortified Roman suburb on the mainland, blocked their path as perhaps no other stronghold in Gaul or Britain could block it.[56] In the very year of the fight of Fontenay, as if they had scented the mutual slaughter from afar, the Northmen had sailed up the stream and had harried Rouen and the surrounding lands with the sternest horrors of fire and sword.[57] Four years later they pressed on yet further into the heart of the defenceless realm; Paris was attacked; in strange contrast with the valour of its citizens forty years later, no one had the heart to resist; the city was stormed and sacked; and King Charles, finding his forces unequal to defend or to avenge, was driven to forestal the wretched policy of Æthelred, and to buy a momentary respite from the invaders.[58] Other attacks, other harryings followed. One more terrible than all, in the year 857, was specially remembered on account of the frightful havoc wrought among the churches of the city. The church of Saint Genoveva, on the left bank of the river--better known to modern ears as the Pantheon--was burned, Saint Stephen's, afterwards known as Nôtre Dame, Saint Germans, and Saint Denis, bought their deliverance only by large ransoms.[59] In the minds of the preachers of the time the woes of Paris suggested the woes of Jerusalem and a wail of sorrow went up from the Jeremiah of the age for the havoc of the city and its holy places.[60]

When we remember the importance to which Paris was plainly beginning to rise under Lewis the Pious, we may perhaps be led to think that it was the constant attacks to which the city was exposed which hindered it from becoming the permanent dwelling-place of royalty under Charles the Bald. That the city held a place in his affections throughout his life is shown by his choosing Saint Denis as the place of his burial. But it never became the royal city of the Kings of his house. We need hardly look on it as a mark of personal cowardice in Charles that he preferred to fix the ordinary seat of his government in some other place than the most exposed fortress of his kingdom. Compiègne now often appears as a royal dwelling-place; but the home and centre of Carolingian royalty in the Western Kingdom gradually fixed itself on a spot the most opposite to Paris in position and feeling which the Western Kingdom could afford. Paris and Laon were in every sense rivals; their rivalry is stamped upon their very outward appearance. Each is a representative city. Paris, like Châlons and Bristol, is essentially an island city; the river was its defence against ordinary enemies, however easily that defence might be changed into a highway for its attack in the hands of the amphibious Northmen. But Laon is the very pride of that class of towns which out of Gaulish hill-forts grew into Roman and mediæval cities. None stands more proudly on its height; none has kept its ancient character so little changed to our own day. The town still keeps itself within the walls which fence in the hill-top, and whatever there is of suburb has grown up at the foot, apart from the ancient city. Paris again was the home of the new-born nationality of the Romance speech,[61] the home of the new French nation. Laon stood near the actual German border, in a land where German was still spoken; it was fitted in every way to be, as it proved, the last home of a German dynasty in the West. There can be little doubt that, by thus moving eastward, by placing themselves in this outlying Teutonic corner of their realm, the Carolingian Kings of the West threw away the opportunity of putting themselves at the head of the new national movement, and of reigning as national Kings, if not of the whole Romance-speaking population of Gaul, at least of its strictly French portion north of the Loire.