Haaretz has an interesting article on the historical archive of Christ Church in the Old City of Jerusalem.  Some excerpts:

Tucked away in Jerusalem’s Old City, between the entrance to the David Street market and the Armenian Quarter is one of Jerusalem’s unsung treasures – a small room chock full of books, letters and documents in the historic Christ Church complex. Many of the documents are hand-written in the flowery style of the 19th century or earlier, written by Europeans, particularly the British, who lived and worked here. Coming to the documents’ hopeful rescue is a recently initiated project that applies a combination of cutting edge technology and devotion to history to set them on their way toward digitalization as a means of preserving the stories they tell for future generations…. To explain what the library is all about, Arentsen’s supervisor and Christ Church’s new rector, Rev. David Pileggi pulls out one of the thousands of glass slides the library also owns. He holds it up, illuminating it in the afternoon Jerusalem sunlight streaming though the windows from the Christ Church courtyard. This one depicts nurses standing next to the beds of patients on a ward of the first hospital in Jerusalem, founded by the missionaries. “Life is complicated,” Pileggi says, using the slide to segue into what is obviously a pet subject of his–dispelling the notion that nineteenth-century European Christians “were only interested in converting Jews to hasten Jesus’ second coming.” Pileggi, an affable and talkative Floridian who has lived in Israel for 28 years broaches an issue that raises hackles in Jewish and Israeli society. He concedes the hospital’s missionary purpose, but seems intent on getting across that it was “mixed with a deep sympathy for the Jews that came from reading the Bible. When you read the Bible and immerse yourself in its culture, as they did in places like England, Holland, and parts of Germany, you begin to identify with the main characters. That’s certainly part of what these people were doing…. The precious documents found in the rare holdings closet put the Conrad Schick Library on a list of over 50 priceless collections whose preservation and digitalization is the goal of the Historical Libraries and Archives Survey, a project under the wing of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. Along with the Conrad Schick Library, the survey aims to preserve and digitize collections throughout Jerusalem – from the Afeefi family’s 43 Arabic manuscripts on astronomy and other science kept in their Jerusalem home to the library in the ancient Syriac Orthodox St Mark’s church with at least 300 manuscripts, the Al Aqsa Mosque repository with about 1,000 manuscripts and hundreds of ancient Korans, and the collection of the Admor of Karlin with more than 800 manuscripts, some centuries old. Dr. Merav Mack, 35, a Cambridge University-educated medieval scholar and a fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, is a consultant on the project along with colleague Peter Jacobsen. “We think the project is important because the city’s written treasures are of such enormous educational and cultural value to our global heritage.”

HT: Joe Lauer

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From National Geographic:

Archaeologists have uncovered more remnants from Tharu, the largest known fortified city in ancient Egypt, which sits near the modern-day border town of Rafah.
The fortress, also known as Tjaru or Tharo, covered about 31 acres (13 hectares), Egyptian authorities say. Its discovery near the Suez Canal was announced in July 2007.
Tharu helped guard the empire’s eastern front in the Sinai Peninsula and served as a military cornerstone for Egypt’s ancient leaders.
“It was built [more than] 3,000 years ago, and it was an important and strategic point,” said Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud, of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.
The fort’s remains were found as part of a project that began in 1986 to explore the “Horus Way,” an ancient military road that connected 11 fortresses linking Egypt and Palestine.
The path also served as an entry point for traders coming from Asia.
“This is the only way to enter Egypt by land coming from the east,” said Fayza Haikal, a professor of archaeology and Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. “It was the way not only for armies but also commercial [expeditions].”
So far Egyptian authorities have discovered four fortresses along the Horus Way, which essentially formed the same line as Egypt’s current eastern border (see map).

The story continues here.

HT: Joe Lauer

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My observation in the past couple of weeks of travels around Israel is that there has not been this many tourists since 2000.  An Arutz-7 story suggests that this is more than a feeling.

The Ministry of Tourism reports that 290,000 tourists visited Israel in April 2008, an amount similar to that recorded in Israel’s record-breaking tourism year, 2000.  The totals for this past April were 26% over April 2006, as well as 41% more than April 2007, when tourism was still negatively affected by the Second Lebanon War eight months earlier.  During the first four months of 2008, 936,000 tourists arrived in Israel – an increase of 43% from the same period in 2007, and 34% more than the same period in 2006.  The current pace of growth is consistent with Tourism Ministry goals to attract 2.8 million tourists to Israel this year.  However, Tourism Ministry Director General Sha’ul Tzemach says that this blessing places in bold relief the increasing shortage of available guest rooms in Israel.

The story continues here.  If you’re planning to bring a group, you would do best to get hotel reservations more than a year in advance.

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My observation in the past couple of weeks of travels around Israel is that there has not been this many tourists since 2000.  An Arutz-7 story suggests that this is more than a feeling.

The Ministry of Tourism reports that 290,000 tourists visited Israel in April 2008, an amount similar to that recorded in Israel’s record-breaking tourism year, 2000.  The totals for this past April were 26% over April 2006, as well as 41% more than April 2007, when tourism was still negatively affected by the Second Lebanon War eight months earlier.  During the first four months of 2008, 936,000 tourists arrived in Israel – an increase of 43% from the same period in 2007, and 34% more than the same period in 2006.  The current pace of growth is consistent with Tourism Ministry goals to attract 2.8 million tourists to Israel this year.  However, Tourism Ministry Director General Sha’ul Tzemach says that this blessing places in bold relief the increasing shortage of available guest rooms in Israel.

The story continues here.  If you’re planning to bring a group, you would do best to get hotel reservations more than a year in advance.

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If you’re in Israel this summer, you may be disappointed that the Archaeology wing of the Israel Museum is closed for renovation (until 2010 or so).  But some students of mine yesterday were going through other sections of the museum and found the Tel Dan Inscription displayed in the Youth wing.  The anthropoid sarcophagi are also on display.

The Isaiah Scroll is on display now until the end of August.  While two shorter sections of the scroll have been rotated on the permanent display over the years, the two longest sections have not been displayed since 1967.  Visitors can now see Isaiah 1-28 and 44-66.

Update (5/21): The above has been corrected to reflect that the inscription is in the Youth wing.

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