In my recently published book I have advanced a theory as to the Wanderings of the Israelites and the loss of the Egyptian Host, which if not entirely original contains a considerable amount of fresh evidence based on ten years’ experience of the Peninsula. Like all theories that tend to upset old beliefs this has resulted in a considerable amount of criticism and comment. The assumption briefly is that the Israelites never went to southern Sinai as has been firmly believed for the last 1900 years, but remained for the whole of the period of the Wanderings in the comparatively small cultivable area in the northeast corner of Sinai where they could grow corn for making bread and find grazing for their flocks. This part of my theory is by no means new as the same views have been expounded already by several students of the Wanderings, and I have merely corroborated their opinion and brought forward new evidence and arguments to prove the theory by virtue of my long residence in the Peninsula and knowledge of the country and climate. The explanation I have given of the loss of the Egyptian Host, however, is a novel one, and so far as I know has never been published previously though Sir William Willcocks assumes that the disaster occurred in a lake in northern Sinai and not in the Red Sea; but the lake he selects is not the Bardawil as I maintain, and the incidents that caused the flooding were totally different from those I have suggested.

The ability to recognize the traces of ancient cultivation is essential to all students of earthworks and field-workers. The scope of our study is being widened, so that we are interested not merely in fortifications but in any kind of interference with the surface soil resulting from man’s activities in the past. It would be purely an arbitrary distinction to be interested in a hill-fort and not in the surface traces of an agricultural village of the same date, and these same surface traces consist very largely in lynchets, or cultivation terraces, the presence of which is often the sole clue to the site of the settlement.

It is a matter of observation that agricultural processes at different periods may leave quite distinct and separate kinds of traces on the ground. This depends on the kind of plough used, and on different habits with regard to the shape, size, and outlay of the fields. The one feature that is common to most ancient fields is the tendency to form terraces on sloping ground, due to the way in which the soil creeps downhill under the influence of ploughing and rain-wash, forming an accumulation along the lower edges of the plot.

Rom very ancient times the church and the churchyard have afforde'd refuge to villagers in time of war. For this reason, wherever practicable, churches have been built on heights, to be the more easily defended. The church served not only as a house of prayer but also as a protecting citadel, defending the lives and property of its children. Already in the 4th century the Armenians had made strong citadels of their churches. The Franks in Merovingian times (481-751) built fortified churches of which that of St. Jean at Poitiers still stands, as well as the church at Remainmontier. After the Saracen invasion most of the churches in the south of France were surrounded with defence works, whereas in northern France they were not defended before the English wars in the fourteenth century. In the Middle Ages most of the churches in the strip of land between the Rhine and the Nahe, called the Gau, were fortified. Osthofen had defence works as early as 1241. In the Middle Ages, too, fortified churches were built in Alsace and Lorraine, or else the existing ones were greatly strengthened. An especially characteristic example is Chazelles in Lorraine, built in the 12th century, in which we are first struck by the placing of the church-tower between the choir and the nave and then by the loop-holes and machicolations.