Ordnance Survey of the Peninsula of Sinai. Charles William Wilson and Henry Spencer Palmer. Southampton: Ordnance Survey Office, 1869–1870. Maps, Plans and Sections.

Description

The First Map of the Interior of Sinai: a Convergence of Espionage and Biblical Geography.

This is the complete map portfolio of the Ordnance Survey of the Peninsula of Sinai, comprising ten large-format sheets: eight maps and two sets of topographical cross-sections, all mounted on original linen with blue silk edging and folding into a custom folio case. Together they constitute the first scientifically accurate mapping of the interior of the Sinai Peninsula, produced by a team of Royal Engineers under Captains Charles William Wilson and Henry Spencer Palmer between 1868 and 1869 at the intersection of three of the most powerful forces in Victorian public life: religious revivalism, the emergence of modern archaeology, and British imperial intelligence.

The Maps in Detail

The ten sheets divide naturally into three groups. The first four are general maps of the southern Sinai at two scales. Maps 1 and 2, at ten miles to the inch, cover the southern two-thirds of the peninsula: Map 1 is the first scientifically accurate general topographical map of the Sinai interior, rendered in black and brown with coastlines in blue wash, charting the wadis that constitute the peninsula’s only viable corridors and expressing the mountain systems through careful hachuring; it includes an inset of the Suez Canal based on Admiralty charts. Map 2 is the same sheet printed as the first geological map of the Sinai, overlaid in full original hand colour with eight geological zones ranging from Syenite (rose) and Metamorphic (purple) through Sandstone (dark pink), Cretaceous (orange), Nummulitic (yellow with dots), and Desert Drift and Raised Beach (ochre).

Maps 3 and 4, at two miles to the inch and each measuring 130 × 103 cm, cover the critical corridor from the Gulf of Suez to the Mount Sinai region: Map 3 is the outline version, the first archaeological and transportation map of this area, meticulously detailing wadis, camel routes, villages, wells, and — in differentiated typefaces indicating Primitive, Egyptian, Sinaitic, and Monastic origins — the locations of inscriptions, ruined temples, stone circles, and other archaeological sites, with areas not reconnoitered honestly marked Unexplored; Map 4 adds hill shading for a fuller topographical picture.

The second group, Maps 5 through 7, constitutes the first scientific survey of Mount Sinai and St. Catherine’s Monastery at six inches to the mile. Map 5, the outline version, shows the deep wadis and high desert peaks of the area with the Monastery — the world’s oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery, founded in 565 AD — shaded in bright pink at the foot of Mount Sinai in the Wady Ed Deir, with the Royal Engineers’ camp shown nearby; specific verses from Exodus are marked at the locations where the survey team believed the described events occurred, alongside chapels, tombs, inscriptions, and features such as the Chapel and Mosque of Moses and the Footprint of the Prophet’s Camel. Map 6 is the hill-shaded version. Map 7 presents four topographical cross-sections of the Mount Sinai massif taken from angles marked on Map 5, with peak heights in feet and the Monastery located along section E–F.

The third group, Maps 8 through 10, replicates the same three-sheet approach for Mount Serbal — at 6,443 feet the alternative candidate for the mountain where Moses received the Ten Commandments — with outline, hill-shaded, and cross-section versions. The Serbal surveys yielded fewer archaeological discoveries than those around Mount Sinai, a finding the maps record with the same empirical honesty that characterizes the whole portfolio.

Historical Context

The Ordnance Survey of the Sinai Peninsula grew from two converging imperatives that Victorian Britain preferred not to discuss in the same breath. The religious motive was genuine and publicly celebrated: following the success of Wilson’s Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem in 1864–65, the Palestine Exploration Fund, established in 1865, had a mandate to apply the methods of modern science to the landscape of the Bible. The Sinai was the obvious next subject: the peninsula through which Moses led the Israelites from Egypt, where he received the Ten Commandments on a mountain whose precise identification remained disputed, and whose ruins, inscriptions, and wadis bore direct witness to the events of Exodus. Mapping it accurately was understood as both a scholarly and a devotional act.

The strategic motive was equally pressing and rather less advertised. The Suez Canal, under construction since 1858 under French auspices, was due to open in 1869 — the very year the survey was completed — and the British government viewed a French-controlled passage between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea with deep unease. The interior of the Sinai, bordering the canal’s southern approaches, was almost entirely unknown to Europeans. Reconnoitering it under the cover of biblical archaeology was an elegant solution, and Wilson, a career intelligence officer as well as a surveyor, was precisely the right man for it. The intelligence acquired proved its value a decade later, when Britain moved to secure the Suez Canal zone under de facto military control in 1882.

The key figures of the survey had all previously worked together surveying the US-British boundary along the 49th parallel in North America. Wilson went on to map the Temple Mount during the PEF’s Survey of Western Palestine, serve as British Consul in Anatolia, and participate in the Desert Column of the 1884 Khartoum Relief Expedition. Palmer redesigned the Port of Yokohama as senior engineering consultant to the Japanese government from 1887. E.H. Palmer, who joined the expedition as interpreter and archaeologist, published The Desert of the Exodus in 1871–72 and became deeply beloved among local Bedouin, who called him Abdallah Effendi. He was killed in the Sinai in 1882, ambushed by Arab sheikhs while attempting to secure British political control over the region.

Publication History and Census

Ordnance Survey Office, Southampton, 1869–70. The full report was published in three volumes: Vol. I (illustrated text account), Vol. II (the present portfolio of maps and cross-sections), and Vol. III (photographic views, principally by Sergeant J. Macdonald). The complete three-volume set is an extreme rarity in commerce; one was recently offered by a New York dealer at $65,000, and the preceding auction record was Sotheby’s, 1972. The present portfolio is Volume II complete, without Volumes I and III.

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