Restoring Palestine: 2000 Years of Mapping

Historically, Palestine has been, and still is, the center of the world’s attention.
Many foreign invaders came and left, the Romans, the Greeks and the Crusaders. The People of the Land remained essentially the same. Some may have changed their religion and language, but they maintained their bond to the land, immortalized in their worship places, shrines and sacred land features.

Invaders left few traces of their presence. The people of the land absorbed them and they remained entrenched in the land. There are few countries in the world that had been subject to so many invasions. They were all gone, except, for now, the Zionist invasion. That is because we have not yet seen the coming end of this violent history. Like all unnatural events, epidemics and historical aberrations, it will no doubt vanish.
With this long trail of invaders, Palestine became the most well-documented country in the world. It surpasses many capitals of Europe. Unlike other histories, Palestine was inflicted with the largest and longest campaign of misinformation, forgery and deception. This forgery and deception are still going on today, only with more sophisticated but spurious scholarship and shady ideology, assisted by well-oiled lobby campaigns.

Palestine is the homeland of Jesus Christ. On its soil he walked, in its villages he dwelt. Because of him, Palestine was immortalized as the Holy Land. This is how it was shown in the Roman history.
 

With the departure of the Romans, Byzantine Christian Palestine recorded the early history of Christianity. We are indebted to a Palestinian Bishop, known by his Hellenistic name, Eusebius of Caesarea, Palestinae (260-339 AD). He was baptized and ordained at Caesarea in about 313 AD. He is credited with writing an account of the first centuries of Christianity.
His most important work, used in our study, is the Onomasticon. It was compiled as a directory of place names, or "gazetteer", for pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem. It also provided historical geographers with contemporary knowledge of 4th-century Palestine. His text was converted to maps like this: We made a full study of the Bishop’s book. By comparison of names in his book with our modern Atlas of Palestine, we identified at least 139 village names and 50 place names, known to us today.  Here are their Byzantine names with the phonetically similar modern names in the same locations. Those same names existed 17 centuries ago.
 

As I said, the heritage of Byzantine Christian Palestine does not end with books. It is ingrained in the popular daily practice and worship. We have recorded, in our modern atlas, about 4,300 historical and religious sites. When the people became Muslims, they converted many of these sites to shrines or maqams and kept reverence to the same places of worship.

I have personal experience of this. In my village land, Al Ma’in, we have a maqam known as Sheikh Nuran, where women went to seek blessing. In 1995, I visited there and found that the Israelis demolished part of it. I saw through the broken window a Byzantine cross!. Research led me to find that this site was the monastery of St Hilarion, a Palestinian monk of the 4th century.

Three hundred years later, in the spring of  637, Caliphah Umar Ibn Al Khattab arrived in Jerusalem and delivered the famous pact, known as the Umariyya Covenant  العهدة العمرية, to its Patriarch Sophronius. It was not a strange encounter. They had been neighbors and had been frequent trading partners.   
With the spread of Islam, most Palestinians became Muslims but they never let go of their land-related places of reverence.
 

From 637 to 1917, for thirteen centuries, Palestine was ruled by Muslim rulers, with the exception of the Crusaders’ brief period.
In 1517, Palestine came under the Ottoman Muslim rule. In their rule of 400 years, they left us a well-documented legacy of land records, laws, habits and customs and remarkable beautiful architecture, especially in 250 buildings in Jerusalem.
 
Of these records, we have the Dafteri Mufassel, the Ottoman Tax Register, for the year 1596, which lists all villages in Greater Syria, which is today Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Transjordan.
We listed 997 villages in the area of Palestine, divided into Liwa (District), Nahiya (sub-district) and village. For each village, we have an estimate of the village population, their millet (religion), what crops and plants they grow and what tax they owed.
  On this basis, we created this Map.
 

It is a remarkable record. We could identify the same names of modern Palestine with slight phonetic Turkish accented variations.

The vast Muslim state, which extended to most of the known world, came under a new threat. Europe returned to the Arab East after 700 years since the Crusades.

This era was ushered by Napoleon’s Campaign in Egypt in 1798. Napoleon came to discover the world of Islam (even he declared himself as an Imam), and to discover his way to India. Three years before his campaign, Count Volney. travelled to Syria and Egypt and wrote a detailed book on the situation there, a kind of intelligence report, which was obligatory reading for Napoleon officers.  Although Napoleon’s campaign lasted only three years, it had a profound effect on the Arab East. He had with him 79 scholars who produced the famous Le Description de l’Egypt in 18 volumes.
 

 
One achievement stands out, A young surveyor by the name of Colonel Pierre Jacotin (1764-1829), produced the first scientifically charted map of Palestine’s coast.
  A flurry of activity followed. Travelers, priests, officers, surveyors, spies and artists descended upon Palestine, Syria and Egypt, drawing the landscape, writing books and charting maps.