drachmae and half drachmae in imitation of the Ayubid dirhems.
The earlier types of these curious coins imitate more or less clumsily the Arabic inscriptions, which are frequently full of errors and intermixed with crosses and occasional Latin letters; the later types bear Christian legends correctly rendered in Arabic characters.
Bibliography.—For Jewish coins see F. de Saulcy, Récherches sur la Numismatique Judaique, Paris, 1854, and F. W. Madden, Coins of the Jews, London, 1903. The Greek and Roman coins are described in de Saulcy, Numismatique de la Terre Sainte, Paris, 1874, and G. F. Hill, Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Palestine, London, 1914. The best work on the Crusading coins is Schlumberger, Numismatique de l'Orient Latin, Paris, 1878–1882 (with bibliography).
§ 5. The Southern Province.
The Handbook of Palestine in no sense aims at taking the place of a guide-book, and the space which it can give to places of interest is necessarily limited. Its function in this connexion must be to enumerate rather than to describe. For a list of the several excellent guide-books to the Holy Land the reader is referred to Part IV., § 5.
Route from Kantara to Gaza.[1]—Kantara (Arabic for "bridge") marks the site of the ancient crossing of the caravan route between the two lakes by which the patriarchs and the Holy Family travelled from Canaan into Egypt. One kilometre north of al-ʾArish (155 kilometres from Kantara) the railway line crosses the broad and shallow wadi which was the "River of Egypt" of the Bible (Numbers, xxxiv., 5}; Isaiah, xxvii., 12). Al-ʾArish, the ancient Rhinocolura, and the Laris of early Christian times, was the death-place of Baldwin I. of Jerusalem, and was taken by Napoleon in 1799.
At Khan-Yunis (kilo. 211) is a mosque built by the
- ↑ See Bishop McInnes's booklet, Notes on the Journey Kantara to Jerusalem, Nile Mission Press, Cairo.
