19th Century British Imperial Mapping of Palestine: Shaping a Western Understanding of the Holy Land

The 1880 Composite Map of Western Palestine, published by the Palestine Exploration Fund, reflects the ten years of intensive survey work of the Holy Land.

The survey project, lasting about ten years, focused not only on the scientific appraisal of the lands topography but also on interviewing its inhabitants. The company gleaned information on the location of sites and developed an understanding of Palestinian society by interacting with the locals in the Arabic dialect.

This groundbreaking study, leads the survey team to conclude the existence of a Palestinian society that, anthropologically should be acknowledged as distinct from the rest of Arab Civilization. (319-320) From a historical and political standpoint this observation is noteworthy.  Zionist and colonialist interaction with the Holy Land was marked by an emphasis on emptiness of the land, culminating in advocacy for its resettlement. Quoted in Zionist circles, Mark Twain’s 1867 account of his visit to Palestine reflects on the land as being “a desolate country . . . We never saw a human being.” 

In contrast, this map is keenly aware of the existence of Palestine’s indigenous society.  The cartographers chose to include the locations of many Muslim holy sites and shrines on the map, as well as mosques and Arab villages.  For this reason, many contemporary historians reference this map as evidence for the existence of Palestinian villages that were wiped out in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.

 

Nevertheless, while this map acknowledges of 19^th century Palestinian society, it does not deem it indigenous to the land or worthy of permanency, in some instances negating or deprioritizing the Muslim-Arab spatial history.  The survey book compares the Muslim Palestinian villagers to the idolatrous Canaanite tribes of biblical times, who God commands the Israelites to eradicate en-mass.

The surveyors heed elements of God’s old-testament death wish in a cartographic sense by prioritizing Judeo-Christian etymology in areas where there are overlapping Christian-Muslim claims to a holy site and spatial history. Jewish and Christian sites that are functionally non-existent outside the realm of ideas are “recreated” on this map by the cartographers. In this manner, places pulled from biblical scholarship are resurrected in the physical realm and given equal significance to existent localities, obscuring the line between past and present.

The demarcation of these biblical sites is part of a project of biblical archeology, which aimed to scientifically prove the events of the bible through locating of biblical sites and making sense of the biblical texts geographical claims.

 

The map’s paradoxical motifs of sociological engagement and erasure highlight the tension between the cartographers’ religious and academic motivations. The unprecedented degree of scientific precision and anthropological research reflected in this map earn it authority and thus render the project of erasure, conducted in the name of Western Christianity, all the more serious.

This cartographic cleansing must also be evaluated in context of the pending military invasion in WWI. The mapping project itself was supported by British Military authorities and completed by individuals with military ties, but it is hard to gauge the degree to which the military link influenced the map’s anthropological record. Neverthless, the cartographers decisions in recording place names and sites undoubtedly framed the perception of British military and political leaders, considering this maps subsequent usage as a tool for the British Military invasion of WWI and a source for the British colonial authorities during the early Mandate period.