Biblical Archaeology School - 18th/early 20th Centuries

18th/early 20th Centuries

Adriaan Reland, professor of philosophy at the University of Harderwijk, was one of the early Orientalists, teaching Hebrew antiquities from 1713. Although he never ventured beyond the borders of the Netherlands, he was also acclaimed as a cartographer and published the first modern work of Biblical archaeology, Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata, a detailed geographical survey of Palestine in 1696 written in Latin and published by Willem Broedelet, Utrecht, in 1714.

The foundations of biblical archaeology were laid in the 19th century with the work of antiquarians such as Johann Jahn, whose manual of biblical antiquities, Biblische Archäologie, (1802, translated into English 1839) was immensely influential in the middle years of the 19th century. Shortly thereafter, Edward Robinson, known as the founder of modern Palestinology published the bestselling Biblical Researches in Palestine, the Sinai, Petrae and Adjacent Regions (1841), which prompted a group of English clergymen and scholars to found the Palestine Exploration Fund "to promote research into the archaeology and history, manners and customs and culture, topography, geology and natural sciences of biblical Palestine and the Levant" in 1865. This was followed by the Deutscher Palästina-Verein (1877) and the École Biblique (1890). The American School of Oriental Research was founded in (1900), and the British School of Archaeology in (1919). The research these institutions sponsored, at least in these early days, was primarily geographic, and it was not until the 1890s that Sir Flinders Petrie introduced the basic principles of scientific excavation, including stratigraphy and ceramic typology to Palestinian archaeology.

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