from 1699. He published, in Latin,Antiquitates Sacræ Veterum Hebræorum
(1708) andPalæstina ex Monumentis Veteribus Illustrata(Palestine illustrated
by Ancient Monuments) (1714) in which earlier sources were critically ana-
lysed. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt led him to Palestine, where he also seems
to have dispatched explorers, but nothing important came out of it, perhaps
due to the arrival of the British and to Napoleon’s retreat (Silberman 1982:
15). A British explorer, from 1808 Professor of Mineralogy at Cambridge,
Edward Daniel Clarke (1769–1822), arrived there in 1801, undertaking a
search for the truly biblical sites (ibid. 18–20). In 1806, a German traveller,
Ulrich Jasper Seetzen (1767–1811), discovered Gerasa in Jordan, a town
which was not named in the Bible, but referred to in the expression ‘country
of the Gerasenes’ (Mk 5:1, Lk. 8: 26, 37). In 1812 the city of Petra, described in
Obadiah 3, 4 and Jeremiah 49:16–18, had been located by the Swiss Johann
Ludwig Burckhardt (1784–1817), a disciple of Clarke. With Seetzen having
been assassinated by poison by the Iman of Yemen and Burckhardt dead of
malaria, the impetus for new explorations decreased (Silberman 1982: 27).
However, Petra would later be studied further by two French travellers: Leon
de Laborde (1807–69) and Louis Linant de Bellefonds (1799–1883), who
published theirWndings in 1828.
Despite these precedents, modern scholarship reserves the title of ‘Father of
Biblical Archaeology’ for the American Edward Robinson (1794–1863). He
was a Congregationalist from New England trained at the Andover Theo-
logical Seminary in Massachusetts, a seminary where a conservative approach
was taken in opposition to the revisionist approach supported at Harvard. In
Andover he was taught by a brilliant Hebraist, Moses Stuart (Moorey 1991:
15). Between 1826 and 1830 he studied in Germany with Carl Ritter, once one
of Humboldt’s prote ́ge ́s, and one of the instigators of the development of
geography and the study of migrations (Chapter 11). Back in America he was
appointed the Professor of Sacred Literature at Andover, and then theWrst
Professor of Biblical Literature at the new Union Theological Seminary in
New York, yet he convinced his new masters to allow him to take three or four
years for his own travels in Palestine. Robinson started the tradition of
research in biblical topography. In his 1841 book he explained the reasons
behind his attraction to the Holy Land:
As in the case of most of my countrymen, especially in New England, the scenes of the
Bible had made a deep impression upon my mind from the earliest childhood; and
afterwards in riper years this feeling had grown into a strong desire to visit in person
the places so remarkable in the history of the human race. Indeed in no country of the
world, perhaps, is such a feeling more widely diVused than in New England.
(Moorey 1991: 15).148 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism