Robinson worked in Palestine for two-and-a-half months in 1838 and
visited the area again in 1852, charting the geography of the Bible. In his
travels throughout Palestine, Robinson was accompanied by one of And-
over’s former pupils, the Reverend Eli Smith, who had become a mission-
ary in the Levant and wasXuent in Arabic. Both set out to inspect the
country for ancient biblical place names and were able to identify over a
hundred sites. Robinson publishedBiblical Researches in Palestinein 1841
andLater Biblical Researchesin 1856 (Moorey 1991: 14–16; Silberman 1982:
ch. 5).
Robinson’s work on biblical topography created an interest in ancient
topography and the beginning of religious tourism in the area (Silberman
1982: 51). His work was later complemented by that of the American
William Francis Lynch (1801–65), the Swiss doctor and politician Titus
Tobler (1806–77) and by the Frenchman Victor Gue ́rin (1821–90). Lynch’s
aim was to examine the possibility of a new trade route through the Holy
Land linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. He organized an exped-
ition to the Dead Sea which was unsuccessful in its economic aims, but
which raised enormous public interest in the area (Silberman 1982: ch. 6).
Tobler visited the region in 1845–6, 1857, and 1865, producing many records
of his travels. Gue ́rin went there several times between 1852 and 1875 and
published a multi-volumedGeography of Palestine(1868–75). During this
period the French explorer Fe ́licien de Saulcy (1807–80) undertook one of
theWrst excavations in the area of the so-called Tombs of the Kings in
northern Jerusalem in 1850–1 and again in 1863 (Moorey 1991: 17–18;
Silberman 1982: ch. 7). The Piedmontese engineer Ermete Pierotti also
worked in Jerusalem in an atmosphere ofWerce international antiquarian
competition (Silberman 1982: ch. 8).
Societies would be one of the novel players in biblical archaeology in
Palestine in the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite this, some still
gave preference to the other biblical areas. This seems to have been the case for
Samuel Birch, a keeper of the British Museum, who forgot to mention the Holy
Land in his inaugural lecture of the London-based Society of Biblical Archae-
ology:
[The society’s] scope is Archaeology, not Theology; but to Theology it will prove an
important aid. To all those it must be attractive who are interested in the primitive and
early history of mankind; that history which is not written in books nor on paper, but
upon rocks and stones, deep in the soil, far away in the desert; that history which is
not found in the library or the mart, but which must be dug up in the valley of the Nile
or exhumed from the plains of Mesopotamia.
(Moorey 1991: 3).Biblical Archaeology 149