Photography, Archaeology, and Imperialism in theNineteenth Century, Part One

Nineteenth Century Imperialism in the Middle East

Part One: James McDonald and the Ordnance Survey

"It is in fact with the Bible in his hand that a traveller ought to visit the Holy Land."

Viscount Franois-Ren de Chateaubriand. Itinraire de Paris Jrusalem (1811)

??Here's a question for you: what is the connection between a college graduation, the Suez Canaland the terrorist group ISIS, also known as ISIL? The answer lies in the political condition of theOttoman Empire in the Levant in relation to the European powers, which were circling like vulturesof a still stirring corpse as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the entirenineteenth century, it was easier to pick off chunks of the recumbent empire than it was to instigatea direct war and the European powers allowed their ally during the Crimean War to continue as anineffective shadow of its former self. If nothing else, the continued existence of the Ottoman Empirewas a check on the ambitions of another circling vulture, the rising Russian Empire. The extent ofthe inability of the Ottoman Empire to respond to the incursions or invasions into its territories by itsfellow empire makers, France and England, can be measured by the weak response of Turkey to theFrench usurpation of Egyptian lands and Egyptian peoples during the building of the Suez Canal.Ever since Napolon scouted Egypt in 1798 and claimed it as his conquest before he returned toFrance, the French were aware to the possibility of cutting a canal across the Isthmus to connect theRed Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. Teams of Napolonic engineers were sent out the explore thefeasibility of such a project but incorrectly concluded that the relative sea levels were tooincompatible for such a connection. It wasn't until 1847 that more modern and accurate surveysrevealed that the levels of the Mediterranean and Red Seas were similar and the dream of a canalwas resurrected.

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In the intervening decades, England had surged ahead of France and began to build a substantialempire, with India firmly in the hands of its East India Company, and Great Britain eyed Frenchactivities in Egypt warily. For England, Egypt was an important land bridge to India. Indeed, due tothe Anglo-Turkish Trade Treaty of 1838, the British Empire had strong trade interests in Egypt,especially in its cotton, accounting for a lion's share of the imports and exports of its subordinatedpartner. And in fact, by mid century, the strategic territory was semi-independent from the OttomanEmpire but under the dubious protection and control of England and France. England, ever

interested in transporting its goods across Egypt, built a railroad, the Alexandria-Cairo-Suez,completed in 1857. In response to the English activities in Egypt, the French proposed the longdreamed of Canal across the Suez. Perhaps wisely, the British stood back and allowed the French todig the massive trench, intending to claim its rewards in increased trade while spending no Englishmoney in the process. During the messy and corrupt business of building the Canal, the Britishprotested the sheer scale of theft of lands from a "simple people" and the outright slavery of theEgyptian workers in the service of the French government of Napolon III. The Emperor was relatedby marriage to the former diplomat, Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805-1894),who was in charge offinancing the project and fashioned a favorable agreement with the viceroy of Egypt, Said Pasha.Pasha, in return, granted the necessary lands along the canal route and needed the quarries formaterials and the human labor, all provided without cost to the French.

Although the actual construction of the Canal began in 1861, the time of the industrial revolution,the conditions for workers was the same as that of ancient Egypt under the Pharaohs-they workedwith their hands, no machines and no salaries. Machines were expensive and cheap labor, four-fifthsof which worked for free under the threat of government violence, greatly increased the futureprofits for the French, especially if those who toiled used the same methods employed underPharaoh Senusret III in 1850 BCE. Igniting a media campaign, the British used the Frenchexploitation of Egyptian labor as a wedge between the French and the rest of the civilized Europeanworld. Eventually, public opinion and threats from the Ottoman Empire, the Porte, forced theEmperor and his minions to pay the workers a living wage in 1863 and the increased expense forcedthe French to use and even invent machines to build the Canal. The Egyptian government went intosuch debt breaking open the Isthmus that it sold the majority of its shares to England and France,who now, for all intents and purposes, owned the Suez Canal when it opened in 1869 in a ceremonyon November 17-surely the high-water mark of the Second Empire. At the request of the viceroy, thecomposer Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) wrote the opera Aida in 1871 and its famous triumphal marchused for college graduations to this day.

Opening the Suez Canal, November 1869

Historically, Egypt was not the only Middle Eastern territory of the Ottoman Empire where Englandand France vied for control. The two nations also took advantage of the lax control of Turkey overthe Levant or the modern nations of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, and Iraq. This isthe medieval territory of the "caliphate" or parts of the old Abbasid Caliphate, from mid eighthcentury to the mid thirteenth century, predating the Ottoman Empire. By the mid nineteenthcentury, all of these nations were within the imperial sphere of England and France, as tolerated bythe Ottoman Empire. The extent to which this modern imperialism was self-assured andunchallenged can be quite literally illustrated by a major photographic activity in the area, the

Ordnance Survey of the Peninsula of Syria, which included Jerusalem. This massive military andbiblical examination of the "holy land" was undertaken by the British Empire between 1864 and1869. "Ordnance" means exactly what the word states, weapons, ammunition, guns, cannon, andother military supplies. The result of this Survey was hundreds of photographs, most taken by asergeant, James McDonald, in the service of his country, a military reconnaissance acting under theguise of biblical antiquarians in search of archaeological sites.

James McDonald. Members of the Sinai Survey

(The Ordnance Survey of the Peninsula of Sinai) (1869)

In 1873, the British publication The Athenaeum announced that the Ordnance Survey of thePeninsula of Sinai made by Capts. C. W. Wilson and H. S. Palmer, R. E., under the direction of Col.Sir Henry James, R. E., Director-General of the Ordnance Survey. 5 vols. had completed itspublication, explaining that three of the five volumes, containing the photographs, had beenpublished two years earlier.The newspaper noted that the idea of the Survey was instigated byreligious figures who wanted to explore what was then called "the Holy Land" to locate the majorsites mentioned in the Bible. The significance of such a religiously inspired "survey" can be betterunderstood not only against the backdrop of the Suez Canal in progress and the recent publicationof Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, a book that challenged conventional Christianassumptions of faith with suggestive science. Photographs, such as those taken by McDonald, ofBiblical sites were thought to be a form of irrefutable proof of the final truth of the events related inthe Bible itself. Today, as Suzanne Richard pointed out in Near Eastern Archaeology: AReader (2003) pointed out, the fields of Biblical archaeology and Palestinian archaeology, i.e.,religious studies and historical studies, while overlapping in spheres of interest, are separate inmethodologies, but in the dawn of archaeology, there would have been no distinction between theBible and actual history.

James McDonald. Seyal (Shittim) Tree, Mouth of Wady Aleyat (from the album "Ordinance Survey ofthe Peninsula of Sinai (1869)

The Ordnance Survey sprang out of an innocent desire on the part of English scholars to find thefact of the Bible. Sponsored by Queen Victoria, the Palestine Exploration Fund, or the PEF, was setup in 1865 by British and American scholars who needed accurate maps and a precise exploration ofthe Holy Land. According to the 2013 book Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. The History of ItsInterpretation. III/I: From Modernism to Post-Modernism, the full title of the PEF was "PalestineExploration Fund. A Society for the Accurate and Systematic Investigation of the Archaeology theTopography, the Geology and Physical Geography, the Manners and Customs of Holy Land forBiblical Illustration." The author Steven W. Holloway also noted that "From the beginning, the PEFoperated in a place and time when Victorian Protestantism marched openly in step with Britishimperial pursuits." When the French built the Suez Canal, the PEF, founded by Arthur PenrhynStanley, Dean of Westminser and Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, providedexcellent cover for the Ordnance Survey, which produced "no nonsense military instruments,virtually devoid of biblical allusion. This pattern of military cartography under camouflage of biblicalresearch would be repeated several times by the PEF"..or what could be termed "Governmentalbacking in the prosecution of Kipling's "Great Game," or the imperial contest between England andRussia.

In her 2003 essay, "Mapping Sacred Geography: Photographic Surveys by the Royal Engineers in theHoly Land, 1864-68," Kathleen Stewart Howe noted that the official survey photographer SergeantJames McDonald posed the Officers of the Royal Engineers of the Ordnance Survey with the PEFscholars of Oxford and Cambridge, who were in the dubious business of "claiming" the Holy Land "asa uniquely British possession." As the author pointed out, echoing Holloway, "Surveying the East, inthis case, the birthplace of Western Christianity, united military surveyors, philologists and biblicalscholars in a quasi-military campaign articulated in terms of the great intellectual project to knowthe Orient. The taking, organizing, collecting and viewing of the photographs was an integral part ofthat project." Howe recognized the tangled alliance between photography and "areas of belief,intellectual inquiry and imperial claim." As early as 1856 the Engineers had prowled aroundJerusalem, as if they owned the territory outright, examining buildings and and bridges, with theintent of modernizing where needed, locating sites where soldiers could drill and even "Recordingthe effects of the explosion of gunpowder in different positions." Keep in mind that all this Britishactivity, from explosions to photography, was undertaken in the heart of the Ottoman Empire withapparent impunity.

Given that the meaning of McDonald's photographs were purely documentary and intended for thecombined military and religious contention that, as the Archbishop of York, William Thomson

expressed it in 1875, "Our reason for turning to Palestine is that Palestine our country. I have usedthe expression before and I refuse to adopt any other," these images by McDonald are devoid of thepoetry expressed by Eadweard Muybridge in Yosemite and lack the flights of imagination played outby Timothy O'Sullivan in the barren deserts of Western America. McDonald was required to recordthe territories of Jerusalem and the Sinai Peninsula for two purposes, military information andreligious convictions, or as Howe eloquently expressed the role of the photographs as "graphicarticulations of a physical possession, defined and justified by a pervasive geopiety centre on thelands of he Bible; at the same time, they reinforce that attachment to sacred place with is geopiety."

James McDonald. Mount Sinai. PEF - Palestine Exploration Fund (1868-1869)

Little is known of McDonald himself beyond the fact that he was a Color Sergeant who had beenselected for the task due to his dual expertise in surveying and photography. The Royal Engineerswere among the first military units that instituted photography as a basic skill taught to thespecialists. McDonald, however, was primarily a surveyor, his main task for the PalestinianExploration Fund. Like all the engineers, he was part of a support group, providing expertise to thescholars, but when he wasn't engaged in the Survey itself, he was expected to take photographs ofimportant religious sites. In his role as photographer, McDonald worked directly under the personalsupervision of the Director General of the Ordnance Survey, Major General Sir Henry James, whohad been instrumental in raising the public subscriptions or funding which paid for the Survey andits staff, including the photographer. Sir Henry even used his own money to purchase the necessaryphotographic equipment and supplies, and the photographs taken by McDonald should beconsidered as supplemental to or illustrative of the (military) maps produced by the Survey party. AsJames explained, "This map is especially required by Biblical scholars and the public, to illustrate theBible history, and to enable them, if possible, to trace the routes which were taken by the Israelitesin their wanderings in the wilderness of Sinai and to identify the mountain from which the Law was

given." Despite the private/public hybridity of the mission of the Survey, the images taken byMcDonald are singularly lacking in any spiritual feeling. It is clear that the Sergeant did not seekeither light or shadow to imply religious implications or significance. Instead, the photographs arebest seen as imperial images, worked up by a military man with a straightforward mind, recordingthe terrain of a weakened ally, Turkey, which was allowing Britain to possess and map what wouldbe its future possessions. In an age of empiricism and positivism, photographs could be "matched" tobiblical sites and became part of an archaeological collection of evidence that reinforced stories toldin the Bible. The intellectual thought process matched the straightforwardness of a McDonaldimage: if a place mentioned in the Bible can be found, then the existence of this sacred terrain"proves" that the Bible is not only true but also "history." Charles Darwin was thus challenged on theempirical ground of scientific evidence.

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