Abstract
MR. JAMES GLAISHER writes from the office of the Palestine Exploration Fund, announcing the discovery of a “Hittite” City.—“A great battle,” he stetes, “figured in Sir G. Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptian”, was fought between Rameses II. and the Hittites near their sacred city of Kadash, which is shown as a city with a double moat, crossed by bridges beside a broad stream running into a lake. The lake has been generally identified with the Baheiret Homs, through which the Orontes passes south of Homs, but the site of the city, as important in Hittite records as the northern capital of Carchemish, remained to be discovered. We now learn from a despatch received from Lieut. Coneler, the officer in charge of our new expedition, that he has identified the lost site v. ith the ruins known as the Tell Neby Mer.deh. They lie on the left bank of the Orontes, four English miles south of the lake. The modern name belongs to a sacred shrine on the highest part of the hill on which the ruins lie, and the name of Kadesh still survives, so that here is another instance of the vitality of the old names which linger in the minds of the people long after they have forgotten the Roman, Greek, or Crusaders' names. Not only the name is preserved, but the ancient moat of the city itself. Lieut. Conder writes:—‘Looking down from the summit of the Tell we appeared to see the very double moat of the Egyptian picture, for while the stream of the Orontes is damtr.ed up so as to form a small lake fifty yards across on the south-east of the site, a fresh brook flows in the west and north to join the river, and an outer line of moat is formed by earthen banks, which flank a sort of aqueduct parallel with the main stream.’”
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Geographical Notes . Nature 24, 67–68 (1881). https://doi.org/10.1038/024067a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/024067a0