The Arabic inscriptions of Dayr-Dubban

Dayr Dubbān was a small village, now in ruins, near the modern village of Luzit, situated to the north of the main road about half way from Jerusalem to Ascalon. On May 21 1863, Victor Guérin the famous French explorer of the Holy Land visited a small village ("seven or eight poor peasant families living in half dilapidated huts") called Dayr Dubbān (a Monastery of the Flies). On the rugged plateau on which this little village was built, Guérin found many round openings in the rocks which looked like openings of wells. In spite of the fact that the local inhabitants called them al-biyār, these were not wells but round apertures giving access to, and lighting huge underground cavities dug into the white limestone. © 1997 The Royal Asiatic Society.