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Syro-Palestinian and Biblical Archaeology

The history of Syro-Palestinian archaeology, or the archaeology of the southern Levant (ancient Canaan; modern coastal and southern Syria, Lebanon, jordan, and israel), and the history of the specialized branch of this discipline, usually called “biblical archaeology,” will be examined.

Roots in the Nineteenth Century: The Exploratory Era

The archaeology of the Holy Land, in the broad sense of the exploration of biblical topography and antiquities, goes back centuries to hundreds of pilgrims’ accounts since the Byzantine period. The modern discipline of Palestinian archaeology, however, can be said to have begun with the pioneering visits of the U.S. biblical scholar Edward Robinson to the Holy Land in 1838 and 1852, an account of which was published as Biblical Researches in Palestine and the Adjacent Regions (1853). Robinson and his traveling companion Eli Smith correctly identified dozens of long-lost ancient sites. The first modern maps, however, after those made by Napoleon’s cartographers, were drawn up by C.R. Conder and H.H. Kitchener for the great Survey of Western Palestine (1872–1878; published in six volumes in 1884). This work was sponsored by the British Palestine Exploration Society (1865–), which also undertook the first actual fieldwork, C.W. Wilson and C. Warren’s soundings around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (1867–1870).

In Egypt and mesopotamia, dramatic archaeological discoveries, which began in the 1840s partly by chance and because of the results of the first deliberate excavations, soon drew attention to Palestine, largely because of its biblical connections. Several foreign societies soon joined the British Palestine Exploration Fund: the German Deutsches Palastina-Vereins (1878–); the French Ecole Biblique et Archéologique in Jerusalem (1892–); and the american schools of oriental research (1900–).

Despite mounting interest, however, true excavations did not begin in Palestine until the brief campaign of the legendary English archaeologist sir william matthew flinders petrie at Tell el Hesy in the Gaza area (possibly biblical Eglon) in 1890, which was soon followed by American work there under F.J. Bliss in 1893. It was Petrie who laid the foundations of all subsequent fieldwork and research by demonstrating, however briefly and intuitively, the importance of detailed stratigraphy of Palestine’s complex multilayered tells, or mounds, and the potential of comparative ceramic typology and chronology.

This first, formative era of archaeological exploration and discovery in Palestine in the nineteenth