568 MERGE TO GYRENE.

wells of excellent water, apparently of ancient construction ; and observed remains of building on a rising ground adjoining, and some tombs excavated in the rock. An hour more, travelling along the brow of the ridge, brought us to Marabut Sidi Arafi, the division between the territories of Derna and Bengazi. Here also we found several wells, and partial remains of building, which continued all the way along the road to Birasa, where their number considerably increased. This has evidently been an ancient site ; and we have no doubt that the whole of the country, through which we this day travelled, was once very thickly inhabited. Traces of ancient pavement are continually met with on the road, which is occasionally flanked by ancient tombs, similar in construction to some of those at Cyrene, and every pass of importance has been fortified with towers of considerable strength *.

* The name of Birasa will naturally suggest a resemblance between it and Irasa, the country which is mentioned by Herodotus as that to which the Greeks were conducted by the natives of Libya. We do not mean to infer, that the place first mentioned has any other connexion with the territory upon which Cyrene was erected, than that which we are going to suggest ; but if the affinity of the Arabic and Hebrew, or Chaldee, to the old Phoenician, or Samaritan language, (an early dialect of the Hebrew,) be really so great as is generally allowed, the two words in question may bear the same meaning without any forced application. The word ras in Arabic, and in Hebrew, signifies a head ; and the term is constantly applied by the Arabs to high and mountainous ground, whether inland or on the coast : land on the summit of a mountain may therefore be said to be — hi-ras — upon the head, or high ground ; and bi-rcis-a would signify, in Arabic, as it does in the case of the teri’itory in question — a tract of land on the upper part of a range of hills — and might be applied w'ithout any impropriety to a similar tract of land of whatever extent. It is not, perhaps, improbable that ras had the same meaning among the Libyan tribes, (whom we may suppose to have spoken some dialect of the old Phoenician,) as it bears in Arabic and Hebrew ; and that the particle bi or be, was at