it is impossible to define its extent. The tower
would seem to have been thirty-five feet in height,
and the summit to have been a level of about four
feet in diameter. By digging below this tower, and
pulling out stones from the sides, which we carefully
replaced, we demonstrated to our satisfaction
that it was solid. It was built on nothing but the
soil of the place, and was erected over nothing ; the
foundations go down for one foot below the floor of
cement which covered the enclosure, and it has been
preserved to us simply by its solidity, its long through
stones, and the way in which the stones have supported
one another. We investigated the smaller
tower very thoroughly, and found it also solid.
The religious purport of these towers would seem
to be conclusively proved by the numerous finds we
made in other parts of the ruins of a phallic nature
{vide Chap. VI.), and I think a quotation from Mont-
faucon’s ‘ L’Antiquité Expliquée ’ will give us the keynote
of the worship. ‘ The ancients assure us that all
the Arabians worshipped a tower, which they called
El Acara or Alquetila, which was built by their
patriarch, Ishmael.’ ‘Maximus of Tyre says they
honoured as a great god a great cut stone ; this is
apparently the same stone resembling Venus, according
to Euthymius Zygabenus. When the Saracens
were converted to Christianity they were obliged to
anathematise this stone, which formerly they worshipped.’
This tower doubtless corresponded to the
sacred tower of the Midianites, called Penuel, or the
‘Face of God,’ which Gideon destroyed (Judges