| 1840–41 Royal Engineers maps of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria | |
|---|---|
 The Aldrich and Symonds map of Jerusalem | |
| Created | 1840-41 |
| Location | The National Archives (United Kingdom) |
| Author | Royal Engineers |
The1840–41 Royal Engineers maps of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria was an early scientificmapping of Palestine (including a detailedmapping of Jerusalem), Lebanon and Syria.
It represented the second modern, triangulation-based attempt at surveying Palestine, following the FrenchCarte de l'Égypte.[1]
It has occasionally been mislabeled as an Ordnance Survey map; in fact none of the officers worked for the Ordnance Survey, which was a separate organization.[2] TheOrdnance Survey of Jerusalem, carried out almost 25 years later, was a separate and materially more detailed endeavor.
The Jerusalem map was printed privately for theBoard of Ordnance in August 1841. It was published in a reduced form in Ralph Carr Alderson's ‘’Professional Papers of the Royal Engineers’’ in 1845,[3] and subsequently as a supplement to the 1849 second edition of ReverendGeorge Williams'The Holy City: Historical, Topographical, and Antiquarian Notices of Jerusalem together with a 130-page memoir on the plan.[4][5] The memoir contained a three-page appendix defending the plan from criticism received fromEdward Robinson.[4]
The map may have been the source of the modern tradition of dividing Jerusalem intofour "quarters". Matthew Teller writes that this convention may have originated in the 1841 map,[6] or at least George Williams' subsequent labelling of it.[7]
The maps of theOld City of Acre,Old City of Gaza,Old City of Haifa andOld Jaffa were published in Ralph Carr Alderson'sNotes on Acre and Some of the Coast Defences of Syria in 1843.[8]
Some of the regional maps were never published in their entirety.[1] A private printing for the British Foreign Office was produced in 1846.[9] The only published map, Map 2, was published inCharles Henry Churchill's book on Mount Lebanon.[9] Map 3 was used in the creation of Van de Velde's map.[1]
Charles Wilson later explained that the data "was in too fragmentary a state for publication".[10]
The survey contained a number of flaws. Thetheodolite was often operated by Symonds alone, miscalculations were made around heights (e.g. on theSea of Galilee), and the outlines of the Haram es-Sharif in Jerusalem were known to have been miscalculated. As such, scholars such as Edward Robinson and August Petermann chose not to trust the work.[11]
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What wasn't corrected, though - and what, in retrospect, should have raised much more controversy than it did (it seems to have passed completely unremarked for the last 170-odd years) - was [Aldrich and Symonds's] map's labelling. Because here, newly arcing across the familiar quadrilateral of Jerusalem, are four double labels in bold capitals. At top leftHaret En-Nassara and, beneath it,Christian Quarter; at bottom leftHaret El-Arman andArmenian Quarter; at bottom centreHaret El-Yehud andJews' Quarter; and at top right - the big innovation, covering perhaps half the city -Haret El-Muslimin andMohammedan Quarter. No map had shown this before. Every map has shown it since. The idea, in 1841, of a Mohammedan (that is, Muslim) quarter of Jerusalem is bizarre. It's like a Catholic quarter of Rome. A Hindu quarter of Delhi. Nobody living there would conceive of the city in such a way. At that time, and for centuries before and decades after, Jerusalem was, if the term means anything at all, a Muslim city. Many people identified in other ways, but large numbers of Jerusalemites were Muslim and they lived all over the city. A Muslim quarter could only have been dreamt up by outsiders, searching for a handle on a place they barely understood, intent on asserting their own legitimacy among a hostile population, seeing what they wanted to see. Its only purpose could be to draw attention to what it excludes.
But it may not have been Aldrich and Symonds. Below the frame of their map, printed in italic script, a single line notes that 'The Writing' had been added by 'theRevd. G. Williams' and 'the Revd. Robert Willis'… Some sources suggest [Williams] arrived before[Michael] Alexander, in 1841. If so, did he meet Aldrich and Symonds? We don't know. But Williams became their champion, defending them when the Haram inaccuracy came up and then publishing their work. The survey the two Royal Engineers did was not intended for commercial release (Aldrich had originally been sent toSyria under 'secret service'), and it was several years before their military plan of Jerusalem came to public attention, published first in 1845 by their senior officer Alderson in plain form, without most of the detail and labelling, and then in full in 1849, in the second edition of Williams's book The Holy City. Did Aldrich and/or Symonds invent the idea of four quarters in Jerusalem? It's possible, but they were military surveyors, not scholars. It seems more likely they spent their very short stay producing a usable street-plan for their superior officers, without necessarily getting wrapped up in details of names and places. The 1845 publication, shorn of street names, quarter labels and other detail, suggests that… Compounding his anachronisms, and perhaps with an urge to reproduce Roman urban design in this new context, Williams writes how two main streets, north-south and east-west, 'divide Jerusalem into four quarters.' Then the crucial line: 'The subdivisions of the streets and quarters are numerous, but unimportant.' Historians will, I hope, be able to delve more deeply into Williams's work, but for me, this is evidence enough. For almost two hundred years, virtually the entire world has accepted the ill-informed, dismissive judgementalism of a jejune Old Etonian missionary as representing enduring fact about the social make-up of Jerusalem. It's shameful… With Britain's increased standing in Palestine after 1840, and the growth of interest in biblical archaeology that was to become an obsession a few decades later, it was vital for the Protestant missionaries to establish boundaries in Jerusalem… Williams spread his ideas around.Ernst Gustav Schultz, who came to Jerusalem in 1842 as Prussian vice-consul, writes in his 1845 book Jerusalem:Eine Vorlesung ('A Lecture'): 'It is with sincere gratitude I must mention that, on my arrival in Jerusalem, Mr Williams ... willingly alerted me to the important information that he [and] another young Anglican clergyman, Mr Rolands, had discovered about the topography of [Jerusalem].' Later come the lines: 'Let us now divide the city into quarters,' and, after mentioning Jews and Christians, 'All the rest of the city is the Mohammedan Quarter.' Included wasa map, drawn byHeinrich Kiepert, that labelled the four quarters, mirroring Williams's treatment inThe Holy City.
