Holy Land

The Holy Land has been mapped more continuously and by more hands than almost any other region on earth. From the earliest printed atlases of the sixteenth century to the detailed military and administrative surveys of the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, cartographers returned again and again to a region whose geography was simultaneously sacred, contested and commercially important. The antique maps that survive from this long tradition offer an unparalleled record of how successive cultures understood, represented and laid claim to the same landscape.

The earliest printed maps of the Holy Land derived largely from the geographical descriptions of Ptolemy and from the accounts of Christian pilgrims. They placed Jerusalem at the centre of the known world — literally, in some medieval mappae mundi — and oriented the map with east at the top, in the direction of Paradise. By the sixteenth century, with the growth of the Flemish and German publishing trades, these theological conventions began to give way to increasingly systematic cartography, though biblical place-names and the itineraries of the scriptures continued to shape what cartographers chose to record and how they labelled it.

The great atlas publishers of the seventeenth century — Ortelius, Mercator, Blaeu, Jansson and their successors — each included maps of the Holy Land as a matter of course, and these remain among the most sought-after of all antique maps. Their decorative quality is high: elaborate cartouches, figurative borders depicting biblical scenes or costume studies, and the characteristic calligraphy of the Dutch Golden Age all contribute to maps that are as much works of art as instruments of navigation or survey.

The eighteenth century brought more rigorous topographic survey to the region, particularly in the work of French cartographers accompanying the Napoleonic expedition of 1798–1801. The Description de l’Egypte and the surveys associated with it extended systematic measurement into Palestine and Syria for the first time, producing maps of a precision that earlier generations could not have achieved. British interest intensified through the nineteenth century, culminating in the great surveys of the Palestine Exploration Fund, whose work in the 1870s and 1880s produced the first truly modern maps of the region.

Collectors of Holy Land maps are drawn to this material for many reasons. Some seek the earliest printed maps as examples of Renaissance cartography; others focus on the development of geographic knowledge through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; still others are drawn to the rich biblical and historical associations that no other region can match. The variety of available material — from small-format atlas maps suitable for framing to large wall maps and detailed survey sheets — means that there is accessible material at every level of the market.

The maps in this collection span the full chronological range of European printed cartography, from sixteenth-century atlas sheets to nineteenth-century surveys, and encompass the full geographic scope of the Holy Land as variously defined — from the Sinai peninsula to the Euphrates, from the Mediterranean coast to the Transjordan plateau. Each represents a moment in the long and complex history of how this region has been seen, measured and imagined by the outside world.