File 756/1917 Pt 1 ‘ARAB BULLETIN Nos 1 to 65’ [‎477r] (958/1240)

proceed north into the Hanran and Jebel Druz, where Oppen-
heim’s “ Von Mittelmeer zmn Persischen Golf” begins to be
useful, and more than one of Schumacher’s intensive studies of
small districts (Schumacher compiled a map of the East Jordan
lands for the German Palestine Society) can be consulted.
Returning to Western Palestine, we find a wealth of rather
out-of-date books, mostly in English and of pious tendency ;
but the most comprehensive and useful are probably Guerin’s
“Description de la Palestine” (several volumes) and George
Adam Smith’s “ Historical Geography of the Holy Land.” The
statistical volumes of Cuinet cannot be neglected for any part of
Syria; but they are already somewhat out of date.
Great and constant as has been the public attention chal
lenged by the Lebanon region, 1 know no good recent book on
its societies. Two chapters in Oppenheim’s first volume, combi
ned with Gobineau and with Wortabet’s rather ancient work on
“ The Religions of Syria,” will give the most necessary informa
tion. For Damascus and its oasis, Oppenheim and Miss Bell can
be used after the reader has been grounded in earlier literature,
represented by Porter’s “Five Years in Damascus,” etc.; and
those same two books, with the Memoirs of the Princeton Expe
dition (H. C. Butler), and Lady Anne Blunt s “ Bedouins of the
Euphrates,” must serve for the desert fringe from the Hauran
to the neighbourhood of Aleppo. But about the Orontes Valley
and the hills and coast north of the Lebanon proper, there is
very little to read. Miss Bell takes one to Homs and Hamah and
a little into the western mountains, but even she fails us between
Hamah and Antioch. Few European visitors have ever stayed
in, and still fewer have described, the middle Orontes V alle} ;
and as for the Lebanon and its continuation through Jebel
Ansariyah to Jebel Musa, no one ever seems to go to those hills
with an exploring purpose, or if any one does, he publishes no
record. There are few regions of Asia less well known than that
hundred-mile course of the Orontes from Hamah to Jisr Hadid,
together with the range which looks down on the one side to its
valley, on the other to the sea.
In Antioch and Aleppo and their neighbourhoods we return
to Miss Bell’s illuminating guidance ; but needless to say, she did
not set herself to describe any place m Syria m the gazetteer
manner, which alone would satisfy all our needs. In the region
remaining to the north, the district of Islahiyah-Rilhs Marash
A diaman-Aintab, which used to be called Commagene, two German
books of travel are useful, viz H urn aim s mid Puchstem s
“Reisen in Nord Syrien,” and Sachaus “ Am Euphrat , but
neither is at all comprehensive. The plain truth of the matter is
that the greater part of Syria, north of the buttmnds of Eebanoi
and anti Lebanon, though it presents few difficulties to enter
prising explorers and has much to attract them, remains still
“unpublished” in this twentieth century. D G H