Survey of Western Palestine
In 1874, at age 24, Kitchener was assigned by the Palestine Exploration Fund to a mapping-survey of the Holy Land, replacing Charles Tyrwhitt-Drake, who had died of malaria. Kitchener, then an officer in the Royal Engineers, joined fellow Royal Engineer Claude R. Conder, and between 1874 and 1877 they surveyed what is today Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, returning to England only briefly in 1875 after an attack by locals in the Galilee, at Safed.
Conder and Kitchener’s expedition became known as the Survey of Western Palestine because it was largely confined to the area west of the Jordan River (Hodson 1997). The survey collected data on the topography and toponomy of the area, as well as local flora and fauna. The results of the survey were published in an eight-volume series, with Kitchener’s contribution in the first three tomes (Conder and Kitchener 1881–1885).
This survey has had a lasting effect on the Middle East for several reasons:
- The ordnance survey serves as the basis for the grid system used in the modern maps of Israel and Palestine.
- The collection of data compiled by Conder and Kitchener are still consulted by archaeologists and geographers working in the southern Levant.
- The survey itself effectively delineated and defined the political borders of the southern Levant. For instance, the modern border between Israel and Lebanon is established at the point in the upper Galilee where Conder and Kitchener’s survey stopped.
Read more about this topic: Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener
Famous quotes containing the words survey of, survey, western and/or palestine:
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)
“When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.”
—Isaac Watts (1674–1748)
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
—A.J. (Arthur James)