Finally, Palestine contains the tract from which it derives its name, the low country of the Philistines, which the Jews called the Shephelah, together with a continuation of this tract northwards to the roots of Carmol, the district known to the Jews as “Sharon,” or “the smooth place.”  From Carmol to the Wady Sheriah, where the Philistine country ended, is a distance of about one hundred miles, which gives the length of the region in question.  Its breadth between the shore and the highland varies from about twenty-five miles, in the south, between Gaza and the hills of Dan, to three miles, or less, in the north, between Dor and the border of Manasseh.  Its area is probably from 1400 to 1500 square miles, This low strip is along its whole course divided into two parallel belts or bands-the first a flat sandy tract along the shore, the Ramleh of the modern Arabs; the second, more undulating, a region of broad rolling plains rich in corn, and anciently clothed in part with thick woods, watered by reedy streams, which flow down from the great highland.  A valuable tract is this entire plain, but greatly exposed to ravage.  Even the sandy belt will grow fruit-trees; and the towns which stand on it, as Gaza, Jaffa, and Ashdod, are surrounded with huge groves of olives, sycamores, and palms, or buried in orchards and gardens, bright with pomegranates and orange-trees.  The more inland region is of marvellous fertility.  Its soil is a rich loam, containing scarcely a pebble, which yields year after year prodigious crops of grain—­chiefly wheat—­without manure or irrigation, or other cultivation than a light ploughing.  Philistia was the granary of Syria, and was important doubly, first, as yielding inexhaustible supplies to its conqueror, and secondly as affording the readiest passage to the great armies which contended in these regions for the mastery of the Eastern World.

South of the region to which we have given the name of Palestine, intervening between it and Egypt, lay a tract, to which it is difficult to assign any political designation.  Herodotus regarded it as a portion of Arabia, which he carried across the valley of the Arabah and made abut on the Mediterranean.  To the Jews it was “the land of the south”—­the special country of the Amalekites.  By Strabo’s time it had come to be known as Idumsea, or the Edomite country; and under this appellation it will perhaps be most convenient to describe it here.  Idumasa, then, was the tract south and south-west of Palestine from about lat. 31 deg. 10’.  It reached westward to the borders of Egypt, which were at this time marked by the Wady-el-Arish, southward to the range of Sinai and the Elanitic Gulf, and eastward to the Great Desert.  Its chief town was Petra, in the mountains east of the Arabah valley.  The character of the tract is for the most part a hard gravelly and rocky desert; but occasionally there is good herbage, and soil that admits of cultivation; brilliant flowers and luxuriantly growing shrubs bedeck