The New York Times · New York, New York · 21 May 1911

CP-1911-005

Palestine’s Transformation

Long Periods of Drought Responsible for the Aridity of the Holy Land

A review of Palestine and Its Transformation, by Ellsworth Huntington (Houghton Mifflin Co.)

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Transcribed from the clipping

“NOT only the high, narrow plateau of Judea, whence came the religious inspiration of nearly one-half of the world’s inhabitants, but the neighboring regions of Palestine, the Arabian desert and Asia Minor, have long puzzled geologists, historians, and archaeologists. Here was once an extensive empire, rich and densely populated, but now the abode of desolation.

Over the sparsely peopled deserts are scattered the ruins of such important ancient cities as Palmyra, Petra, Philadelphia, Gerasa, Hebron, and Beersheba, innumerable villages, and the remains of orchards and vineyards, temples, aqueducts, baths, theatres, and similar remains of a luxurious civilization.

Various answers have been offered to questions regarding the transformation of this empire into an arid waste. The most plausible and generally considered is climatic changes. Others are the ravages of war, deforestation, exhaustion of the soil, changing tides of commerce, and a failure of the inhabitants to conserve their resources.”

How this transcription was made

The headline, the two-line summary and the opening of the review have been read back against the scan. The rest runs to four agate columns and has not been transcribed.

Context added by this archive

The empty-land description in its scholarly form, in the New York Times of 1911, reviewing a Yale geographer. The land is now the abode of desolation and sparsely peopled; what is scattered over it is ruins. The list of possible causes ends on a failure of the inhabitants to conserve their resources, which is the only appearance the inhabitants make.

Four months earlier a syndicated correspondent had spent a page describing those inhabitants plowing, threshing and keeping sheep (CP-1911-002); six months later the News Herald opened a column with the flat statement that Palestine has a present population (CP-1911-007). All three ran in American papers in the same year.

Cite this clipping

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