Victorian Ethnographic Perceptions of Palestine and the Historiography of Ancient Israel: A Preliminary Exploration

Abstract

Victorian travellers, explorers and scholars in the Levant produced a series of ethnographic observations of Palestine’s indigenous population essentially through biblical lenses. These perceptions sought ultimately to retrieve the biblical past in the context of the imperial present. At the same time, modern historiography about ancient Israel developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the full-blown allochronism and Orientalism of the early modern Western visitors to Palestine have in recent decades been surpassed by more critical insights in the scholarly assessment of the region, some traits from that Victorian ethnographic and Bible-centred gaze still linger in contemporary historical constructions of ancient Palestine through the concept of ‘ancient Israel’, notably in the conceptualisation and periodisation of such a history.