Western Asia : The Hebrews 105 Their showy clothes, fine houses, beautiful furniture, and their The earliest hard-heartedness toward the poor were things unknown in the (eighth" desert. Men who chafed under such injustices of town life century b.c.) turned fondly back to the grand old days of their shepherd wanderings out yonder on the broad reaches of the desert, Fig. 56. Ruins of the Houses of Ancient Jericho Only the stone foundations of these houses are preserved. The walls were of sun-baked brick, and the rains of over three thousand years have washed them away; for these houses date from about 1500 B.C., and in them lived the Canaanites, whom the Hebrews found in Palestine (p. 102). Here we find the furniture of these houses, in so far as it con- sisted of things durable enough to survive, like the pottery jars, glass, and dishes of the household ; also things carved of stone, like seals, amulets and ornaments of metal where no man "ground the faces of the poor." It was a man with such admiration for the nomad life of the fathers who be- came the earliest-known historian ^ and told the immortal tales of the Hebrew patriarchs, of Abraham and Isaac, of Jacob and 1 Unfortunately we do not know his name, for the Hebrews themselves early lost all knowledge of his name and identity, and finally associated the surviving fragments of his work with the name of Moses.
