New York Herald · New York, New York · 19 January 1890
CP-1890-002
DIGGING DEEP IN BIBLICAL DUST.
Work of the Palestine Exploration Fund Summarized in Book Form. WALTER BESANT’S OBSERVATIONS. Mr. Henry A. Harper’s Graphic Pictures of the Holy Land and Interesting Comments on Recent Excavations. BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW.
Transcribed from the clipping
The Palestine Exploration Fund have authorized the publication of a work which summarizes their explorations and excavations in the Holy Land, and which is to be brought out in this country by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Mr. Walter Besant, the honorary secretary of the society, in his introduction gives an account of the manner in which the book came to be written.
When the Memoirs of the Survey were published by the society, only some five hundred people in all could get that great work and could acquaint themselves with the mass of material collected by the industry of Claude Conder.
It was believed that these discoveries furnished strong confirmatory proof of the accuracy of of the sacred writings, and it was thought that something should be done to put an account of these researches into popular form. The difficulty was to get a man to prepare such a book.
It was, in the first place, necessary that the writer should have been a traveller, not a tourist, in Palestine. The next essential qualification was that he should have a thorough knowledge of the Bible. The committee fixed upon Mr. Henry A.
Harper, author of “Letters to My Children from the Holy Land,” an artist who has painted the lands of Sinai, Palestine and Egypt, and who has also a profound knowledge of the Bible, as a proper person to discharge this task.
How this transcription was made
Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.
Context added by this archive
Date check: the masthead reads NEW YORK HERALD, SUNDAY, JAN — the scan is trimmed at the right edge so the day-of-month and year are cut off and not visible. Jan 19 1890 was a Sunday, which is consistent with what is legible, but the year cannot be confirmed from this image.
Cite this clipping
"DIGGING DEEP IN BIBLICAL DUST.," New York Herald, 19 January 1890. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1890-002. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1890-002
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- PalestineNew York Herald · 9 May 1870
- They Are Not Going to PalestineNew York Herald · 16 April 1892
More from the 1890s
- THROUGH PALESTINE.Brooklyn Eagle · 21 February 1890
- The Fellaheen of PalestineThe Day · 13 March 1891
- Orange Growing in PalestineAkron Beacon Journal · 13 December 1893
- Mrs. Dr. Bliden's Work for Girls in Safed, Palestine, ComplimentedKansas City Journal · 26 August 1895
- Farming in PalestineAlexandria Gazette · 18 July 1896
- Jewish State in Palestine OpposedThe New York Times · 9 July 1897
- All 13 clippings from the 1890s →
Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
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-1890-002.
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