Up to the present century most pilgrims and travellers had visited the valley of the Jordan only at Jericho, hence we had no account of its features in the upper portions. Antoninus Jlartyr at the close of the 6tli cent., and St. Willibald in the 8th, passed down through the whole length of the valley from Tiberi.as to Jericho; and in 1100 king Baldwin I. accompanied a train of pilgrims from Jericho to Tiberias (Fulcher Camot) ; but there is nothing more than a mere notice of these journeys. During the present century, Seetzen, Burckhardt, Irby and Mangles, Banks and Buckingham, Thom- son, Porter, Molyneux, Lynch, J. Macgregor, Guirin, Lie^-in, Robinson, liave visited and de- scribed portions of the Jordan ; and in later years the officers of the Palestine Exploration Fund have thoroughly examined, surveyed, and described it {PEFSt, 1869-97, SU'P).
Geological Features. — The Jordan flows from north to south in a portion of a deep fissure or crevasse on the surface of the earth, nearly parallel to the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, extendinf; from the foot of the Taurus Mountains, past Antioch, up the valley of the Orontes, through Coile-Syria, between Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, down the valley of the Jordan and Salt Sea, and through the Wddii el-Arab to the Gulf of 'Akabah, from lat. 38° N. to 30° N. This fissure appears as the most remarkable on the face of the earth, owing to its being cut oti' from the sea, in so dry a climate that the excessive evaporation keeps the surface of water in the Salt Sea about 1300 ft. below the level of the Mediterranean and Red Sea. It was suggested, probably first by BurcWiardt, that the river Jordan originally flowed down the whole course of the depression from the Lebanon to the Gulf of 'Akabah ; but this view has been rejected with reason by Lartet and subsequently by Hull, and the following is the theory of the formation of the vallej', deduced from the oliservations and memoirs of the above learned geologists.
Professor Hull, in his examination of the W&du el-Ardbah over a distance of 120 mUes from north to south, found that it had been hollowed out along the line of a main ' fault' ranging from the eastern shore of the Salt Sea to that of the Gulf of 'Akabah. He foimd numerous parallel and branch 'faults' along the Arabah Valley, but there was one main ' fault ' running along the base of the Edomite mountains, to which the others are of secondary importance. This is called by him the ' Great Jordan Valley Fault.' Lartet, Tristram, and Wilson h.ad already shown that in the Jordan Valley and Gh6r there was the evidence of a large
* in; is reall.v an E^^-ptian loan-word (see Ox/. Heb. Lex. I v.\ and is the special designation in OT of the Nile.
JORDAN
JORDAN
767
' fault' corresponding to tlie line of tliis remarkable depression, and Hull considers that the features he observed in the Ar&bah Valley are continuous with those of the Jordan. He considers that in this part of the world the Miocene period was one of elevation, disturbance, and denudation of strata, not of accumulation, the Miocene period not being represented by any strata throughout the di.-trict traversed by his expedition. To this epoch he refers the emergence of the whole of the Palestine, and the greater part of the Sinaitic, area from the Bea, in which the cretaceo-nummulitic limestone formations were deposited. To this epoch also he considers the ' faulting' and flexuring of the strata to be chiefly referable, and notably the formation of the great Jordanic line of ' fault,' ^vith its branches and accompanying flexures in the strata, which are very remarliable along the western side of the Ghfir. These phenomena were accompanied and followed by extensive denudation, and the production of many of the principal features of the region re- ferred to.
From that epoch down to the present day these physical features appear to have changed in a comparatively small degree, as the area referred to slowly rose above from the waters of the Miocene and Pliocene oceans. For a limited time there would have necessarily been a connexion between the waters of this great gulf or valley, 200 miles in length and 10 in breadth, and tliesouthem 'Altabah sea through the valley of "Aljabah ; but, from the time that the outer waters were dissevered from those of the Jordan-Arabah lake by tlie uprise of the land, there is no evidence that there was any subsequent connexion bj- means of a stream flowing down from the north into the Gulf of 'Akabah. All indications appear to be against this. It would appear that, at a period coming down probably to the prehistoric, a chain of fresh • water lakes existed among the tortuous valleys and hollows of the Sinaitic peninsula. There are still fresh-water shells in the wadis Feiran and e^Shdkh, and these belong to a period when the conti^uousoceans were about 200 ft. higher over the land than at present, indicating that during this later period there has been a further rise of about 2(X) ft. The eWdence of this rise was observed al.so in the Gulf of 'A kabah. From the ejioch during the Miocene period when the inland sea was dissevered from the waters of the adjoining oceans, its level would entirely depend upon the amount of rain water from rivers which poured into it, balanced against the amount abstracted by evaporation. Lartet has computed that at the present d.ny at lea.st 6,r)00,000 tons of ■water are evaporated daily from the Salt Sea.