Introduction

Haim Goren, Jutta Faehndrich and Bruno Schelhaas

Much of the research dealing with nineteenth-century Palestine describes the period as the ‘century of change’. The territory underwent a process of transformation from an underdeveloped, sparsely populated and neglected province of the Ottoman Empire to a country on its way to modernisation. Along with local Ottoman reform processes, one of the factors in this transformation was the influence of Europeans, which took many forms. This included religious, diplomatic and economic activity, European immigration and settlement, and intense field research of a country that had hitherto not been the focus of European scientific exploration.

The first decidedly modern scientific investigations of the Holy Land began in the middle of the eighteenth century but the real increase in European activity happened after the 1830s. The early stage was followed mainly by sporadic and intermittent studies of a general nature. Limited in scale and scope, these works were initiated and conducted by individuals or small groups, including religious and social organisations, and only occasionally supported, though not initiated, by governments. Scholars from Europe – mainly Great Britain, France and Germany, Russia and North America – were the main protagonists. As the century advanced, discovery and exploration gave way to programmed scientific research, which eventually focused on special topics or regions.

The history of Holy Land cartography followed the broad contours of this process. Earlier ‘modern’ maps suffered many deficiencies, mainly due to a reliance on partial data that were neither precise nor systematic. However, over the course of the nineteenth century, an increasing body of material, based on relatively reliable and precise measurements, was collected and the maps accordingly became more accurate.

The mapping of the Holy Land was greatly shaped by German scholarship, either by German scholars themselves or by others who were strongly affiliated to, and influenced by, the German cultural and scientific community. The two outstanding figures within this were the American Biblical scholar and minister Edward Robinson and the Dutch naval officer, cartographer and landscape painter Charles William Meredith van de Velde, both active from the late 1830s to the 1860s. Both undertook their own survey, made their own measurements and noted down their itineraries. In combination with already existing knowledge, their data thus generated was used to produce new maps of the region. The German cartographer and science manager August Petermann is the third central protagonist described in this volume. He participated in the British debate on the Dead Sea level and the features of Palestine’s physical geography in the 1850s, and he produced a number of influential maps of the region. Moreover, there are interesting connections between the three individuals involved.

In the case of Edward Robinson, who cooperated closely with his companion Eli Smith, we were able to reconstruct a highly complex network of agents and an often complicated collaboration with the cartographer Heinrich Kiepert when it came to producing the maps. The cooperation was international, but with a strong German influence, very closely connected to Heinrich Berghaus, Carl Ritter and the German scholarly community in Berlin, Leipzig, Halle and Göttingen.

The situation was very favourable for a historical study: besides a great number of basic printed sources – in particular Robinson’s travel books and research reports, Kiepert’s map memoir and Kiepert’s main maps – we were able to identify and make use of a unique body of archival sources, many of them representing the very first time by any scholar. The Edward Robinson Papers at Hamilton College Library (Clinton, NY) and the Eli Smith Papers at Houghton Library, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA) were certainly most important for this task. It was both a challenge and a unique opportunity to have access to more than 1,250 relevant documents, mainly handwritten, including an intense correspondence between Robinson and Smith during the writing of their book and production of the maps. Both had almost unreadable handwriting, which called for careful and professional deciphering (the use of ‘[?]’ in some extracts shows where it was completely unreadable). With regard to the German collections it was, in particular, the Berlin State Library that offered an extensive range of relevant documents concerning our topic. The Map Department holds several Palestine sketch maps and published maps created by Heinrich Kiepert, and the papers of Carl Ritter and Heinrich Berghaus, which offered much contextual information, can be found in the Manuscript Department. Much of this archival material is referred to and quoted in Chapter 1.

In contrast to Edward Robinson and his network, C. W. M. van de Velde was a highly independent scholar, researcher and cartographer, combining many skills in one person. His fieldwork was planned strategically to get all the necessary data and material for his Map of the Holy Land. Again, his knowledge transfer and map-making were international, but carefully chosen. The cooperation with Justus Perthes’ publishing house in Gotha originated in van de Velde’s decision to produce his Map of the Holy Land at the best possible quality.

The documents found in the unique Perthes Collection at Gotha Research Library provided the basis for studying the making of this map in a most detailed way. After a close reading, decipherment and transcription of several hundred pages of correspondence between van de Velde and his publishers, including third parties, we were able to reconstruct the history of knowledge production with an emphasis on the intense exchange between van de Velde and Justus Perthes. The holdings of the Perthes Collection yielded a number of new facts regarding the map-making process. Surprisingly, August Petermann was not involved in making the 1858 Map of the Holy Land. Instead, the managing director Adolf Müller, one of two managers who took over after the untimely death of senior director Bernhardt Perthes, discussed and decided all details with van de Velde.

Chapter 3, on August Petermann’s Palestine maps, shows a highly talented cartographer and science manager, strongly influenced by the German tradition, in direct contact with Alexander von Humboldt and Heinrich Berghaus, but also influenced by British development. He never set foot in the Holy Land but he was able to collect and combine all available information, often exclusively, as the basis for several new Palestine maps. Petermann’s contributions to Palestine cartography date back to his Edinburgh years in the mid-1840s and became more important after his move to London in 1847. Here he established his own cartography business and produced a series of atlases in very short time, all of them containing Palestine maps. In Petermann’s years in Gotha at Justus Perthes, from 1854 until his death in 1878, Palestine was not so much the focus of his work. Nevertheless, the few Palestine maps in his journal, the Mittheilungen, and in particular the sheets for Stielers Hand-Atlas, attest to Petermann’s unique method of operation, including an interpolation of all available knowledge and a strategic crossover marketing of his maps. Again, the Perthes Collection was the most important source for our analysis. Most of the documents were available for scholarly use for the very first time.

In the mid-nineteenth century, cartography and geography, as well as the emerging Biblical Geography were in the middle of a professionalisation process. The competitive relation between the various European agencies and protagonists involved in making and publishing maps of Palestine is a central theme within the following chapters. Obviously, the most important ideology and belief behind mapping Palestine was its character and quality as the Holy Land. On the one hand, there is Charles William Meredith van de Velde, a surveyor and cartographer trained with the Dutch navy who decided to measure Palestine single-handedly, driven by Protestant zeal. He was a generalist and amateur Biblical Geographer, who did not, however, meet the later criteria of an academic scholar. On the other hand, there is the American Edward Robinson, founding father of Biblical Geography as a scholarly discipline, who published the maps to accompany his Palestine research in Germany with Heinrich Kiepert, who would become the foremost German cartographer of the nineteenth century. Finally, there is August Petermann, the highly talented cartographer and organiser, who was able to collect all the available and the latest information about Palestine research, often exclusively. Mapping the Holy Land presents three different approaches to Biblical Geography, each with a different strategy of visualisation and knowledge transfer.