length of the region in question. Its breadth between the shore and the
highland varies from about twenty-five miles, in the south, between Gaza
and the hills of Dan, to three miles, or less, in the north, between
Dor and the border of Manasseh. Its area is probably from 1400 to 1500
square miles, This low strip is along its whole course divided into two
parallel belts or bands-the first a flat sandy tract along the shore,
the Ramleh of the modern Arabs; the second, more undulating, a region
of broad rolling plains rich in corn, and anciently clothed in part with
thick woods, watered by reedy streams, which flow down from the great
highland. A valuable tract is this entire plain, but greatly exposed to
ravage. Even the sandy belt will grow fruit-trees; and the towns which
stand on it, as Gaza, Jaffa, and Ashdod, are surrounded with huge groves
of olives, sycamores, and palms, or buried in orchards and gardens,
bright with pomegranates and orange-trees. The more inland region is
of marvellous fertility. Its soil is a rich loam, containing scarcely a
pebble, which yields year after year prodigious crops of grain--chiefly
wheat--without manure or irrigation, or other cultivation than a light
ploughing. Philistia was the granary of Syria, and was important doubly,
first, as yielding inexhaustible supplies to its conqueror, and secondly
as affording the readiest passage to the great armies which contended in
these regions for the mastery of the Eastern World.

South of the region to which we have given the name of Palestine,
intervening between it and Egypt, lay a tract, to which it is difficult
to assign any political designation. Herodotus regarded it as a portion
of Arabia, which he carried across the valley of the Arabah and
made abut on the Mediterranean. To the Jews it was "the land of the
south"--the special country of the Amalekites. By Strabo's time it had
come to be known as Idumsea, or the Edomite country; and under this
appellation it will perhaps be most convenient to describe it here.