Sketch of Palestine

M. de Chateaubriand

Transcribed from the clipping

"Villages, laid waste by fire and sword, present themselves in every direction, and in the cities, as at Mistra for instance, entire suburbs are abandoned." Of Jerusalem: "a heavy square mass, built low, without chimneys or windows... The whole city resembles a cemetery in midst of a desert."

Context added by this archive

The oldest item in the collection, eighty-four years older than anything else. A Philadelphia paper reprinting a French traveller on Palestine as ruin and desert. This is where the language of a desolate, emptied land enters American print, decades before anyone proposed settling it.

Correction to the caption this arrived with

arrived captioned Salem Weekly Advocate 1844; the masthead reads Pennsylvania Gazette, Wednesday, May 20, 1812

Cite this item

"Sketch of Palestine," Pennsylvania Gazette, 20 May 1812. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1812-001. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1812-001

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. The city is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1812-001.

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