Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
21
result(s) for
"Palestine Exploration Fund."
Sort by:
Pioneering British exploration and scriptural geography: The Syrian Society/The Palestine Association
This paper relates to a unique pioneering British association established in London in 1805, for the 'philosophical, physical and biblical' study of Palestine/the Holy Land. The short-lived Syrian Society/Palestine Association (PA) adopted the model of the African Association, founded by Sir Joseph Banks in 1788 for the promotion of travel and discovery in Africa. The PA was a predecessor of two important British scholarly societies: the Royal Geographical Society (RGS, founded 1830) and the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF, founded 1865). We first consider the historical, religious and scientific contextual background to the period, following the Napoleonic Wars in the Ottoman Empire and the revival of Christian religious beliefs and biblical criticism in Britain and Europe. Based on primary archival sources not previously studied, we then analyse the declared objectives of the Association, its founders, membership, structure, mode of operation, interrelations with consuls, traders, bankers and organisations (such as the Levant Company, the East India Company and contemporary missionary societies), accomplishments, and possible reasons for its failure. We discuss its closure in 1834, the transfer of its funds to the newly founded RGS, and the later establishment of its 'daughter in spirit', the PEF in 1865.
Journal Article
Archaeology and the old testament
Archaeology is a science in which progress can be measured by the advances made backward into the past. The last one hundred years of archaeology have added a score of centuries to the story of the growth of our cultural and religious heritage, as the ancient world has been recovered from the sands and caves of the modern Near East-Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq. Measured by the number of centuries which have been annexed to man's history in a relatively few years, progress has been truly phenomenal. This book deals with the recent advance and with those pioneers to the past who made it possible. Interest in biblical history has played an important part in this recovery. Names such as Babylon, Nineveh, Jericho, Jerusalem, and others prominent on the pages of the Bible, have gripped the popular imagination and worked like magic to gain support for excavations.
This book is written from the widely shared conviction that the discovery of the ancient Near East has shed significant light on the Bible. Indeed, the newly-discovered ancient world has effected a revolution in the understanding of the Bible, its people, and their history. My purpose is to assess, in non-technical language which the layman can understand, the kind of change in viewing the biblical past which archaeology has brought about in the last century. Since the text of the Bible has remained constant over this period, it is obvious that any new light on its meaning must provide a better perspective for seeing the events which it describes. In short, I am concerned with the question, How has history as written in the Bible been changed, enlarged, or substantiated by the past century of the archaeological work?--from the Preface
eBook
Roads and Harbors
This chapter provides a survey of the system of public roads in the region of Syria, Arabia, and Judaea/Palaestina and of the harbors on the Mediterranean coast. The systematic exploration of the Roman road network in Palestine started with the mapping activities of the Palestine Exploration Fund, a project which culminated in a series of maps published by the Fund. The road system east of the Jordan was studied by scholars such as Schumacher, Germer‐Durand, and Butler. The road system in the province of Judaea/Syria Palaestina was an integrated system of four north‐south arteries and a series of east‐west routes. A study of the coastal road in Syria has shown that there was a change of organization of the road system in 198. In the plain and valleys, roads followed an alignment as straight as possible, familiar from aerial photographs all over the empire. The eastern Mediterranean coast has few good natural harbors.
Book Chapter
Sacred, but not surveyed: Nineteenth-century surveys of Palestine
Nineteenth-century Palestine mapping projects based on systematic land surveying reached a peak with the Ordnance Survey of Western Palestine between 1871 and 1877, conducted on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund by officers of the British Royal Engineering Corps. Various other nineteenth-century proposals for an organized survey of the country-some of which bore partial results while others were never implemented-are also presented. The surveying of one region, Mesopotamia, during the 1830s and 1840s, forms the basis for the discussion of the reasons for the relative lateness of the topographical survey. The sacredness of the region seems not to have been a sufficiently convincing motive for entrepreneurs to organize and finance such a survey. The main reason for the delay in mapping the country as a whole was that it was not especially important, either strategically or geo-politically, for the European nations engaged in the international struggles in the Middle East until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Journal Article
British Archaeological Work in Jerusalem between 1865 and 1967
Jerusalem, above all places, was the city that needed excavation; from its great antiquity, it carried within its ruins traces of ages and generations further back than any city in the world; it had been seventeen times captured and destroyed, so that it was literally a series of masses of ruins heaped one upon another, and wherever you begin to dig, you come not upon solid ground but upon house-tops and such like, buried at all varieties of depths below the surface. These ruins contained, so to speak, the key to the internal topography of Jerusalem.¹
A surge in the
Book Chapter