eriphery of the city
by the eye.

In the great Corinthian colonnade, one of our party called me to him, and
showed me some inscriptions about the public edifices along that line,
and at the Temple of the Sun. There was one inscription in Latin, on a
square pedestal; a similar one near it, broken across, had a Greek
inscription. The rest were all in Greek, but so defaced or injured that
seldom could a whole word be made out. However, we found, in a small
temple beyond the city wall to the north, in a ploughed field, an
inscription more perfect, containing the work _Nemesis_ in the first
line. There also I saw several mausoleums, with sarcophagi handsomely
ornamented, and fragments of highly-polished red Egyptian granite
columns, to our great surprise as to how they had arrived there,
considering not only the distance from which they had been brought, and
the variety of people through whose hands they had passed since being cut
out roughly from the quarries of upper Egypt; but, moreover, the
difficulty to be surmounted in bringing them to this elevation, across
the deep Jordan valley, even since their disembarkation from the
Mediterranean either at Jaffa or Caiffa.

The inscriptions that I had been able to collect were as follows:--

[Picture: Two inscriptions]

Among all the hundreds of fragments of fine capitals and friezes lying
about Jerash, there was not one that was not too heavy for us to carry
away. I found no ornamented pottery, although we had found some even at
Heshbon; neither coins, nor even bits of statues. And remarkable enough
in our European ideas, so little space appeared for private common
habitations--as usual among ruined cities of remote antiquity--it seemed
as if almost the whole enclosure was occupied by temples or other public
institutions.

Yet there must have habitations for a numerous population. And, again,
such a city implies the existence of minor towns and of numerous villages
around, and a complete immunity from incursions of wild Arab tribes.
These latter were unknown to a population who could build such temples,
naumachia, and colonnades, and who were protected farther eastwards by
the numerous cities with high roads, still discoverable in ruins beyond
this--Belka and 'Ajloon. But of how different a character must have been
the daily necessities of these old populations from the requirements of
modern European existence. _We_ should not be satisfied w