Lecture Summaries: 13 October, 2005

Back to PEF Main Pages

The Secret Survey - Newcombe's Survey of Southern Palestine 1914
by
 

It is often assumed that the archaeological survey of north-eastern Sinai and southern Palestine carried out early in 1914 by Leonard Woolley and T E Lawrence, and leading to the publication of ‘The Wilderness of Zin’, was the topographical survey of the Negeb, and that Lawrence played a significant role in this. 

In fact Woolley and Lawrence were engaged in the archaeological survey for a mere six weeks, while the topographical survey, for which the archaeology formed a thin and inconsequential cover, lasted nearly six months and was executed by two officers and two NCOs of the Royal Engineers (Capt S F Newcombe, Lieut J P S Greig, Corporals J Rimmer and W McDiarmid) and a civilian surveyor belonging to the Egyptian Survey Department, C F Montagu. 

It was intended to link the 19th century surveys of Palestine, carried out by the Royal Engineers under the auspices of the PEF, with the recent survey of northern Sinai by the Egyptian Survey Department and the Royal Engineers, at a time when the War Office was seriously considering offensive operations through Sinai into Palestine in the event of war with Turkey. This linking survey of southern Palestine was naturally undertaken with the consent of the Ottoman authorities, but whether their permission extended to the Akaba province was a moot point. 

This lecture by Dr Peter Chasseaud, an historian of military cartography, is based on a close study of the archival documentation and surviving survey and mapping material and examines the reasons for the survey, the precise nature of the trigonometrical and topographical operations carried out by the surveyors, the cartographic documentation and the utility of the survey during the First World War. In this context, it also looks at other aspects of the topographical survey, particularly those related to terrain analysis – routes, ‘going’ (trafficability), water supply, fuel, etc.