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It was perhaps grown in the neighbourhood of Aleppo. The "white wool" may have been furnished by the sheep that cropped the slopes of the Antilibanus, or by those fed on the fine grass which clothes most of the plain at its base.
Eastward of Antilibanus, in the tract between that range and the great Syrian desert, was another very important district the district which the Jews called "Aram-Dammesek," and which now forms the chief part of the Pashalik of Damascus.
The most northern, which is called the Bahret-esh-Shurkiyeh, receives about half the surplus water of the Barada, together with some streamlets from the outlying ranges of Antilibanus towards the north. The central one, called the Bahret-el-Kibliyeh, receives the rest of the Barada water, which enters it by three or four branches on its northern and western sides.
But now, my Sampsiceramus, what will you say to this? That you have secured us a revenue from the Antilibanus and removed that from the Campanian land? Well, how do you mean to vindicate that? "I shall coerce you," says he, "by means of Cæsar's army."
To the Damascus country must also be reckoned those many charming valleys of Hermon and Antilibanus which open out into it, sending their waters to increase its beauty and luxuriance, the most remarkable of which are the long ravine of the Barada, and the romantic Wady Halbon, whose vines produced the famous beverage which Damascus anciently supplied at once to the Tyrian merchant-princes and to the voluptuous Persian kings.
But he found that the whole of the fleet had been already removed to the ports of Egypt, and he ordered Phoenicia to furnish him with eight thousand shipbuilders and carpenters, to build galleys from the forests of Lebanon and Antilibanus, and ordered Syria to send four hundred and fifty thousand medimni, or nearly three millions of bushels of wheat, for the use of his army within the year.
The Orontes, the great river of Assyria, rises in the Buka'a the deep valley known to the ancients as Coele-Syria Proper springing from a number of small brooks, which flow down from the Antilibanus range between lat. 34° 5' and lat. 34° 12'. Its most remote source is near Yunin, about seven mites N.N.E. of Baalbek.
The course of the Barada from the small lake is at first towards the east; but it soon sweeps round and flows-southward for about four miles to the lower end of the plain, after which it again turns to the east and enters a romantic glen, running between high cliffs, and cutting through the main ridge of the Antilibanus between the Zebdany plain and Suk, the Abila of the ancients.
The Barada, or river of Damascus, rises in the plain of Zebdany the very centre of the Antilibanus. It has its real permanent source in a small nameless lake in the lower part of the plain, about lat. 33° 41'; but in winter it is fed by streams flowing from the valley above, especially by one which rises in lat. 33° 46', near the small hamlet of Ain Hawar.
What used to be Egypt was an inland kingdom, surrounded by the desert; but Egypt under Ptolemy was country on the sea-coast; and, on the conquest of Phoenicia and Coele-Syria, he was master of the forests of Lebanon and Antilibanus, and stretched his coast from Cyrene to Antioch, a distance of twelve hundred miles.
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