The Russians and British were not alone. The consuls of the Great Powers, many of them religious ministers, also fancied themselves as archaeologists, but it was American Christians who really created modern archaeology.* The French and Germans were not far behind, pursuing archaeological spectaculars with ruthless national esprit, their emperors and premiers keenly backing their digs. Like the space race in the twentieth century with its heroic astronauts, archaeology quickly became a projection of national power with celebrity archaeologists who resembled swashbuckling historical conquistadors and scientific treasure hunters. One German archaeologist called it ‘the peaceful crusade’.
The Prince of Wales’ visit encouraged the expedition of a red-coated British officer and archaeologist, Captain Charles Wilson, who, in the tunnels close to the Western Wall under the Gate of the Chain Street, discovered the monumental Herodian arch of the great bridge reaching across the Tyropaean Valley to the Temple. It is still known as Wilson’s Arch, and this was just the start.
In May 1865, an array of patricians, from Earl Russell the foreign secretary to the Duke of Argyll, founded the Palestine Exploration Fund with contributions from Queen Victoria and Montefiore. Shaftesbury would later serve as its president. The visit to Palestine of the first heir to the British throne since Edward I ‘opened the whole of Syria to Christian research’, explained the Society’s prospectus. At its first session, the Archbishop of York, William Thompson, declared that the Bible had given him ‘the laws by which I try to live’ and ‘the best knowledge I possess’. He went further: ‘This country of Palestine belongs to you and me. It was given to the Father of Israel. It’s the land whence comes news of our redemption. It’s the land where we look with as true a patriotism as we do this dear old England.’
In February 1867, Lieutenant of Royal Engineers Charles Warren, twenty-seven years old, began the Society’s survey of Palestine. However, the Jerusalemites were hostile to any excavations around the Temple Mount so he hired plots nearby and sank twenty-seven shafts deep into the rock. He uncovered the first real archaeological artefacts in Jerusalem, the pottery of Hezekiah marked ‘Belonging to the King’; forty-three cisterns under the Temple Mount; Warren’s Shaft in the Ophel hill that he believed was King David’s conduit into the city; and his Warren’s Gate in the tunnels along the Western Wall was one of Herod’s main entrances to the Temple – and later the Jewish Cave. This adventurous archaeologist personified the glamour of the new science. In one of his subterranean exploits he uncovered the ancient Struthion Pool and sailed on it on a raft made of doors. Fashionable Victorian ladies were lowered in baskets down his shafts, swooning at the biblical sights as they loosened their corsets.
Warren sympathized with the Jews, angered by the boorish European tourists who mocked their ‘most solemn gathering’ at the Wall as if it were a ‘farce’. On the contrary, the ‘country must be governed for them’ so that ultimately ‘the Jewish principality might stand by itself as a separate kingdom guaranteed by the Great Powers’.* The French were just as aggressive in their archaeological aspirations – though their chief archaeologist, Félicien de Saulcy, was a bungler who declared that the Tomb of Kings just north of the walls belonged to King David. In fact it was the tomb of the Queen of Adiabene dating from a thousand years later.
In 1860, Muslims massacred Christians in Syria and Lebanon, furious at the sultan’s laws in favour of Christians and Jews, but this only attracted further Western advances: Napoleon III sent troops to save the Maronite Christians of the Lebanon, refreshing French claims to the area that had survived from Charlemagne, the Crusades and King Francis in the sixteenth century. In 1869, Egypt, backed by French capital, opened the Suez Canal at a ceremony attended by the French empress Eugénie, the Prussian crown prince Frederick and the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph. Not to be outdone by the British and Russians, the Prussian Frederick sailed up to Jaffa and rode to Jerusalem, where he vigorously promoted a Prussian presence in the race to grab churches and archaeological prizes: he bought the site of the Crusader St Mary of the Latins, close to the Church, and Frederick (the father of the future Kaiser Wilhelm II) backed the aggressive archaeologist Titus Tobler, who declared: ‘Jerusalem must be ours.’ As Frederick headed back to Jaffa, he almost rode into Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria and titular King of Jerusalem, who had only recently been defeated by the Prussians at the Battle of Sadowa. They greeted one another coldly.
Franz Joseph galloped into Jerusalem escorted by a thousand Ottoman guards, including Bedouin with lances, Druze with rifles, and cameleers, and accompanied by an enormous silver bed, a present from the sultan. ‘We dismounted,’ the emperor recorded, ‘and I knelt in the road and kissed the earth’ as the cannon of David’s Tower boomed a salute. He was overcome by ‘how everything seemed to be just like one imagined it from one’s childhood stories and the Bible’16 But the Austrians, like all the Europeans, were buying buildings to promote a new Christian city: the emperor inspected the huge earth-works to build an Austrian Hospice on the Via Dolorosa.
‘I shall never concede any road improvements to these crazy Christians,’ wrote the Ottoman grand vizier Fuad Pasha, ‘as they would then transform Jerusalem into a Christian madhouse.’ But the Ottomans did build a new Jaffa road especially for Franz Joseph. The momentum of the ‘Christian madhouse’ was unstoppable.
MARK TWAIN AND THE ‘PAUPER VILLAGE’
Captain Charles Warren, the young archaeologist, was passing the Jaffa Gate when he was amazed to witness a beheading. The execution was horribly botched by a clumsy headman: ‘You’re hurting me,’ cried the victim as the executioner hacked at his neck sixteen times until he just climbed on to the unfortunate’s back and sawed through his spinal column as if he was sacrificing a sheep. Jerusalem had at least two faces and a multiple personality disorder: the gleaming, imperial edifices, built by the Europeans in pith helmets and redcoats as they rapidly Christianized the Muslim Quarter, existed alongside the old Ottoman city where black Sudanese guards protected the Haram and guarded condemned prisoners whose heads still rolled in public executions. The gates were still closed each sundown; Bedouin surrendered their spears and swords when they came into the city. A third of the city was a wasteland and a photograph (taken by the Armenian Patriarch no less) showed the Church surrounded by open country in the midst of the city. The two worlds frequently clashed: when in 1865, the first telegraph opened between Jerusalem and Istanbul, the Arab horseman who charged the telegraph-pole was arrested and hanged from it.
In March 1866, Montefiore, now a widower of eighty-one, arrived on his sixth visit and could not believe the changes. Finding that the Jews at the Western Wall were exposed not only to the rain but to occasional pelting from the Temple Mount above, he received permission to set up an awning there – and tried unsuccessfully to buy the Wall, one of many attempts by the Jews to own their holy site. As he left Jerusalem, he felt ‘more deeply than ever impressed’. It was not his last trip: when he returned in 1875 aged ninety-one, ‘I beheld almost a new Jerusalem springing up with buildings, some of them as fine as any in Europe.’ As he left for the last time, he could not help but muse that ‘surely we’re approaching the time to witness the realization of God’s hallowed promises unto Zion.’*