The Roman remains at Bath, dominated by the stately thermal establishment, have always been associated in geography and in archaeology with the goddess Sulis-Minerva. The famous pediment of her temple, found when the eighteenth-century Pump Room was built, has long been accounted one of the most remarkable manifestations of Romano-British art; its richly carved reliefs have always invited restoration; and they at once received it, somewhat sketchily from Englefield and most ingeniously from Samuel Lysons in 1802 (pl. XXIII). So convincing, indeed, was the main outline of Lyson's reconstruction that it held the field and remained the basis of all subsequent proposals, including that so carefully elaborated by the late A. J. Taylor. The discovery of the stones carried with it the site of the temple; for the blocks cannot have fallen far. It lay below the Pump Room, on the north side of the sacred pool whose copious hot springs were enclosed by the Romans in an irregular polygonal basin. The sanctity of the spring, which seems only later to have been roofed, is proved by the many coins and the leaden tablet inscribed with a curse which it contained, but, unlike many sacred pools, for example, that of Nemausus at Nîmes, it was not itself frequented by bathers. It could be viewed from the Baths through three great open windows on its south side; and these were of some architectural pretensions, the central member having a true arch, and the flanking pair (of which one survives (pl. XXIV, 2)) joggled flat arches, while the corridor within was furnished, as was no other part of the Baths, with fluted pilasters (pl. XXIV, 1).
The western shore of the Dead Sea, the most remarkable natural feature in Palestine (fig. 4), is a strip of flat or very gently sloping land, mostly barren, its parched surface seamed with a wrinkled pattern of erosion channels. The strip represents in part the old bed of the lake, once larger than now, and in part the spill of detritus from the rocky cliffs which tower above it. These precipitous heights form an almost unbroken wall some 300 ft. high extending from Qumran to Sdom, being patterned in high relief only by the few wadis which bite through them and carry the rare but torrential winter rains. The cliffs themselves are but the floor of the plateau through which the Jordan valley has opened its deep and famous rift, reaching a depth of over a thousand feet below Mediterranean sea-level; and from the plateau itself rises the mountainous, pitiless desert of Judah, stretching to Hebron 21 miles westward and draining eastwards towards the rift-valley. Where the eastward face of the cliffs is cut by water-courses it is carved into promontories, but in the main these constitute an integral part of wide sweeps of hinterland and are not positions of strength. At one point only (fig. 5) do two wadis flow close together and then divide, to tear out deep ravines behind a promontory, and almost to cut it off on the landward side. The spot in question is Masàda (pl. XVI), a lozenge-shaped table-mountain, 730 yds. long and 215 yds. wide overall, lofty, isolated and to all appearance impregnable.
The compilation of the Ravenna Cosmography, as we have it, belongs to the late seventh century. It was done by a cleric of Ravenna, for one Odo, whom he describes as ‘dearset brother’ and ‘friend’, and the object of the work is to furnish a list of the countries, towns, and rivers of the known world, compiled from Greek, Roman, and Gothic authors. The author, who nowhere states his name, observes that a list was chosen as the form for the work, for brevity's sake (i, 18), in preference to a map or an itinerary; and its composition was governed by the Judaic version of the division of the world, as prescribed in the tenth chapter of Genesis, in order to harmonize with contemporary Christian belief. The authorities cited are divided (i, 5) into sancti patres and huius mundi philosophi, in an attitude of humane tolerance expressed by the phrase, adiuvante Christo cum munimine philosophorum.
The affinities of the group of Spanish town-walls now to be described are little known, and the walls themselves are of small fame outside Spain. Mélida's book containing a short account of the Lugo wall is rare; Astorga, Barcelona, León and Zaragoza have not been described in detail. Yet they form a distinct group, with common peculiarities which deserve attention, apart from the date and significance of the whole.
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