’One point in the Northern Shephelah round which these tides of war have swept deserves special notice—­Gezer, or Gazar.  It is one of the few remarkable bastions which the Shephelah flings out to the west—­on a ridge running towards Ramleh, the most prominent object in view of the traveller from Jaffa towards Jerusalem.  It is high and isolated, but fertile and well watered—­a very strong post and striking landmark.  Its name occurs in the Egyptian correspondence of the fourteenth century, where it is described as being taken from the Egyptian vassals by the tribes whose invasion so agitates that correspondence.  A city of the Canaanites, under a king of its own—­Horam—­Gezer is not given as one of Joshua’s conquests, though the king is; but the Israelites drave not out the Canaanites who dwelt at Gezer, and in the hands of these it remained till its conquest by Egypt when Pharaoh gave it, with his daughter, to Solomon and Solomon rebuilt it.  Judas Maccabeus was strategist enough to gird himself early to the capture of Gezer, and Simon fortified it to cover the way to the harbour of Joppa and caused John his son, the captain of the host, to dwell there.  It was virtually, therefore, the key of Judea at a time when Judea’s foes came down the coast from the north; and, with Joppa, it formed part of the Syrian demands upon the Jews.  But this is by no means the last of it.  M. Clermont Ganneau, who a number of years ago discovered the site, has lately identified Gezer with the Mont Gisart of the Crusades.  Mont Gisart was a castle and feif in the county of Joppa, with an abbey of St. Katharine of Mont Gisart, “whose prior was one of the five suffragans of the Bishop of Lydda.”  It was the scene, on the 24th November 1174, seventeen years before the Third Crusade, of a victory won by a small army from Jerusalem under the boy-king, the leper Baldwin IV., against a very much larger army under Saladin himself, and, in 1192, Saladin encamped upon it during his negotiations for a truce with Richard.

’Shade of King Horam, what hosts of men have fallen round that citadel of yours.  On what camps and columns has it looked down through the centuries, since first you saw the strange Hebrews burst with the sunrise across the hills, and chase your countrymen down Ajalon—­that day when the victors felt the very sun conspiring with them to achieve the unexampled length of battle.  Within sight of every Egyptian and every Assyrian invasion of the land, Gezer has also seen Alexander pass by, and the legions of Rome in unusual flight, and the armies of the Cross struggle, waver and give way, and Napoleon come and go.  If all could rise who have fallen around its base—­Ethiopians, Hebrews, Assyrians, Arabs, Turcomans, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Saxons, Mongols—­what a rehearsal of the Judgment Day it would be.  Few of the travellers who now rush across the plain realise that the first conspicuous hill they pass in Palestine is also one of the most thickly haunted—­even in that narrow land into which history has so crowded itself.  But upon the ridge of Gezer no sign of all this now remains, except in the Tel Jezer, and in a sweet hollow to the north, beside a fountain, where lie the scattered Christian stone of Deir Warda, the Convent of the Rose.