Suleiman the Magnificent Suleiman the Magnificent was the tenth and longest-reigning Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, from 1520 to his death in 1566. He restored the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Jerusalem city walls. These are still standing today and surround the Old City. At the time of Suleiman’s death the Ottoman […]
Photographs of the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem, Charles W. Wilson, 1865. An official Ottoman village list from about 1870 shows that the village of Siloam (Silwan) had a total of 92 houses and an adult male population of 240. In 1883, the Palestine Exploration Fund’s Survey of Western Palestine described Silwan as a “village perched on […]
Khanqat Salahiyya In preparation for the visit to Jerusalem of the German Emperor Wilhelm II (1898), the Ottoman authorities repaired and tidied up the sections of the city which he was to visit. One of these buildings was Khanqat Salahiyya, named for Saladin, which still constitutes the northwestern corner of the Crusader Church of the […]
Click here to view the entire original document. Click here to view a transcribed PDF of the entire document. The British Colonial Office and Foreign Office prepared this statement for public information. Written at the end of thirty years of British rule in Palestine, it contains a brief review of the history of that period […]
Overview The Story- 539 BCE-632 CE, MyJewishLearning.com. The Story, 622-1666, MyJewishLearning.com. Early Modern Jewish History, MyJewishLearning.com. Overview- Ottoman Empire The Story- 1700-1914, MyJewishLearning.com. Primary sources Bible and Beyond- Archaeology and the Bible Coming to the Promised Land (Zionism) in the Bible Land Purchase in the Bible, Bereshit Rabbah 79-7. The Kingdom of Israel Maimonides […]
Primary sources A Twentieth-Century Yemenite Version of the Pact of Umar, 1905. Sir John Hope and the Yemenites, Excerpt from The Statistical Bases of Sir John Hope’s Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development in Palestine, Jewish Agency, 1931. Hanging of an Iraqi Jew, Eternal Stranger by Lawrence Resner, Country Life Press, NY, 1951 p.141-143. […]
The Promised Land from Abraham to Einstein The Bible tells the story of how the link between Abraham’s descendants and the Land of Israel began. The Lord directed Abraham to travel to the Land of Canaan, and when he arrived, God told him, “To your offspring I will give this land” (Genesis 12-7). Although he […]
In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Beneficent This is a decree which the Jews must obey as commanded. They are obliged to observe everything in it. They are forbidden to disobey it. It is intended to remind them of what the governors of the Ottoman Empire abolished . . . which are required […]
A little-known episode in the beginnings of archaeology in the Holy Land Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope, granddaughter of William Pitt and daughter of the third Earl of Stanhope, was the first person who ever intentionally excavated an ancient artifact in the Holy Land. In this sense, she might be considered the first Biblical archaeologist. But […]
This is part III of a three-part article. Part II appeared in the last issue (“Why Were Hundreds of Dogs Buried at Ashkelon?” BAR 17-03). Throughout most of its 5,000-year history, Ashkelon’s fortunes and destiny were tied to the sea. As a major Mediterranean seaport, it was a commercial and cultural center. From the highlands […]