In the early 1870s, the Palestine Exploration Fund sent a team of explorers to make a detailed survey of the area to the west of the Jordan River. A map was published in 1880 to a scale of 1 inch to 1 mile composed of twenty six individual sheets, each approximately two feet square. It was the first scientific map of the Holy Land.
The CD O’Connelly had bought at the Fund’s headquarters in London contained high resolution photographic copies of all the maps of Western Palestine produced in by the nineteenth century surveyors.
Immense changes had occurred in the interim period of one and thirty years. Not long after the publication of the map Nathan Birnbaum founded modern Zionism in 1892 and the first Aliyah began. Today a map of the Holy Land is very much different from that draw by the surveyors of the Fund, place names have been changed, populations moved and new cities built with roads and infrastructure.
From his laptop O’Connelly could visit the Holy Land of Charles Warren and the army officers of the Royal Engineers. He had the maps reproduced in full colour on paper at a local copy centre near Dizengoff on which he had retraced aqueducts and highlighted archaeological sites with a marker. It was much less costly than the Archive Editions luxury edition of the maps advertised at US$4,795 published in thirteen volumes.
With the aid of the Funds book Thirty Years’ Work in the Holy Land published in 1895, O’Connelly poured over the maps retracing the history of Israel and Palestine. The details of the century old maps were extraordinary, indicating vineyards, orchards, gardens, woods, scrubs, palms, and fir trees. The locations were designated for wine presses, milestones, tombs, wells, cisterns, and caves. The team surveyed successive regions covering all of the territory west of the Jordan River between Tyre in the north and Beersheba in the south.
The original names of many ancient and biblical sites remained transliterated into the present day names in Arabic of many towns and villages.
At the time the survey commenced its work in Palestine the population of Palestine was estimated to be around 450,000 compared to the present day population of about seven million. As in most other regions of the world this population is concentrated in urban centres such as Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Tiberias, Nazareth, Beersheba, Hebron, and Nablus.
What interested him most was Jerusalem’s water supply system at the time of the survey the average annual rainfall about fifty centimetres with the rainy season between November to March, which was no doubt little changed since. The survey indicated how the cisterns and reservoirs had been built for the collection of the rainfall, which was complimented by springs, wells, pools and aqueducts.
Since the Bible nothing comparable to the work of the Survey of Western Palestine had detailed so much knowledge of the Holy Land until the development of the modern state of Israel had been established.
The number of Jews in Palestine was small in the early 20th century; it increased from 7,000 in 1870 to nearly 40,000 by 1912, representing under ten percent of the total population. The majority consisted of Arabic speaking Muslims and Christians. Even the Jewish population of Jerusalem was in a minority.