on the frontier of Egypt, desert and sea do not meet.  Farther north the Arabian plateau is separated from the Mediterranean by a double mountain chain, which runs south from the Taurus at varying elevations, and encloses in its lower course the remarkable depression of the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea, and the ’Arabah.  The Judaean hills and the mountains of Moab are merely the southward prolongation of the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, and their neighbourhood to the sea endows this narrow tract of habitable country with its moisture and fertility.  It thus formed the natural channel of intercourse between the two earliest centres of civilization, and was later the battle-ground of their opposing empires.

(1) See G. A. Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 5 ff., 45 ff., and Myres, Dawn of History, pp. 137 ff.; and cf.  Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 65 ff., and Reclus, Nouvelle Geographie universelle, t.  IX, pp. 685 ff.

The great trunk-roads of through communication run north and south, across the eastern plateaus of the Hauran and Moab, and along the coastal plains.  The old highway from Egypt, which left the Delta at Pelusium, at first follows the coast, then trends eastward across the plain of Esdraelon, which breaks the coastal range, and passing under Hermon runs northward through Damascus and reaches the Euphrates at its most westerly point.  Other through tracks in Palestine ran then as they do to-day, by Beesheba and Hebron, or along the ’Arabah and west of the Dead Sea, or through Edom and east of Jordan by the present Hajj route to Damascus.  But the great highway from Egypt, the most westerly of the trunk-roads through Palestine, was that mainly followed, with some variant sections, by both caravans and armies, and was known by the Hebrews in its southern course as the “Way of the Philistines” and farther north as the “Way of the East”.

The plain of Esraelon, where the road first trends eastward, has been the battle-ground for most invaders of Palestine from the north, and though Egyptian armies often fought in the southern coastal plain, they too have battled there when they held the southern country.  Megiddo, which commands the main pass into the plain through the low Samaritan hills to the southeast of Carmel, was the site of Thothmes III’s famous battle against a Syrian confederation, and it inspired the writer of the Apocalypse with his vision of an Armageddon of the future.  But invading armies always followed the beaten track of caravans, and movements represented by the great campaigns were reflected in the daily passage of international commerce.