Dead Sea exploration and the compilation of a canon of expertise

Technically a hypersaline lake rather than a sea, the Dead Sea is one of the world’s harshest natural environments. Lying in a bowl of desert hills, the lake sits at the lowest point on the earth’s surface, recorded at some 420 metres below sea level in 2008.12 The lake’s water has an average salinity of around 30 per cent, one of the highest of any bodies of water in the world, meaning no marine life can exist there other than a minuscule quantity of bacteria and fungi.¹³ But it is also the lake’s salinity that has lured commercial prospectors to its shores for the past two centuries in the search to extract valuable minerals.

In the late eighteenth century, however, little was known about the Dead Sea’s precise chemical make-up. In Western Europe, pilgrims’ accounts of the lake’s unique and mysterious properties had circulated for many centuries, but it was only in 1786 that the first modern chemical analysis of Dead Sea water was carried out by the renowned French chemist Antoine Lavoisier.¹⁵ The upheavals in French society that began in 1789 put an end to Lavoisier’s research, eventually sending him to the guillotine in 1794, but they also led to a new wave of Western visitors to the Eastern Mediterranean, following Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.¹⁶ One of the first people to turn this interest towards the Dead Sea was the German physician and orientalist Ulrich Seetzen, who visited the lake in 1806.

It would be another thirty years before a more detailed survey of the Dead Sea was completed, with a number of intervening expeditions ending in disaster. Two explorers to suffer this fate were the Irishman Christopher Costigan in 1835 and then, twelve years later, the English naval officer Thomas Molyneux. Both met with multiple difficulties, including being attacked by Bedouin tribes, and both died shortly after returning to Europe, suffering from fever contracted at the Dead Sea.¹⁹ Nevertheless, the work of these early explorations did not go unnoticed in learned Western circles. The passages of Seetzen’s journal that described the Dead Sea, for example, were published in English as early as 1810 for the Palestine Association of London. The journal had been sent to the Association by the National Institute in Paris, via one of the leading figures in British colonial science at that time, Sir Joseph Banks.²⁰ Having translated the extracts into English, the Palestine Association quickly published them with a set of accompanying notes discussing Seetzen’s discoveries in light of other European exploration in the Holy Land.²¹ In the United States, meanwhile, interest in the Dead Sea was also increasing.

On the one hand, these accounts emphasised the continuity of Western exploration at the Dead Sea, praising earlier maps compiled by the American ‘scriptural geographer’ Edward Robinson and his colleague Eli Smith as ‘the most exact of any we have seen’.²⁵ At the same time, the accounts placed great emphasis on the novelty of the expedition, claiming it to be the first systematic and truly scientific exploration of the Dead Sea. In this way, the recent failures of other Westerners, particularly Costigan and Molyneux, were dramatised to enhance the idea that this was a truly ground-breaking expedition.²⁶ Upon completion of their mission the Americans thus cast themselves as the conquerors of virgin territory with all the national prestige this entailed. In this way, Lynch reported how he raised the American flag at Haifa, while his crew-mate, Montague, proudly proclaimed:

With the exception of the United States, no nation can boast of a successful expedition to the shores of the Dead Sea.

A potential contradiction to these claims was presented by the presence of the Bedouin population that had for centuries lived around the shores of the Dead Sea and was thus intimately acquainted with the area. But the Americans instead viewed these communities as possessors of a different type of knowledge. They were carriers of mysterious traditions and superstitions that were inseparable from the landscape itself. Thus, for Montague, the shores of the Dead Sea were ‘rarely visited, except by the wild Arab; and even he holds it in superstitious dread’.²⁸ In Lynch’s descriptions, meanwhile, the Bedouin living around the Dead Sea seem to merge into the physical environment. The first people he encountered after reaching the Dead Sea were the ‘Arabs of the tribe Rashadiyeh’ who were camped at the northern end of the lake: ‘In their ragged brown abas [a loose outer garment]... they looked by moonlight like so many fragments of rock’.²⁹

Occasionally, slippages in this narrative can be found which betray the team’s dependence on local expertise. As with Seetzen before him, Lynch’s journey was only made possible through the constant assistance of dragomen, guards, tradesmen and local guides.³⁰ This was particularly pronounced when it came to circumnavigating the Dead Sea itself, as two Arab guides, Akil Aga and a man named Jum’ah, directed the crew around the lake and frequently averted the threat of attack by local tribes.³¹ Similarly, the knowledge of the Arab servants accompanying the Americans was essential to their physical wellbeing. When they encountered the large fruit of the acacia and osher trees near the village of Mezra’a, for example, they were warned about the ‘viscous milky fluid’ the fruits emit when cut: ‘the Arabs told us it would be extremely injurious to the eyes if it touched them’.³²

At the same time, the Americans’ work was by no means carried out in a purely empirical fashion.

Could it be, that with my companions I had been permitted to explore that wondrous sea, which an angry God threw as a mantle over the cities he had condemned, and of which it had been heretofore predicted that no one could traverse it and live. It was so, for there, far below, through the descending vista, lay the sombre sea. Before me, on its lofty hill, four thousand feet above that sea, was the queenly city.³⁴

Scholars in disciplines ranging from archaeology to photography followed Lynch to the Dead Sea in the 1860s and 1870s with the same mixture of scientific rigour and religious fervour. The English clergyman and naturalist Henry Baker Tristram, for example, made four visits to Palestine between 1858 and 1881, including a specific trip to the eastern side of the Dead Sea in 1872. As a fellow of the Royal Society, Tristram was able to expand the Western canon of expertise on the Dead Sea, particularly in the field of flora and fauna.³⁵ At the same time, he continued the tradition of being motivated primarily by the desire to uncover the sites mentioned in the Old Testament, and his trips were sponsored by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, a British Anglican mission organisa­tion. As Tristram stated in his account of his 1872 trip, The Land of Moab (the biblical name for the mountains on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea): ‘There is scarcely a passage in Holy Writ, in which Moab is mentioned, which was not in some degree illustrated during the journey’.³⁶