By Amara Thornton

In the final years of the First World War, British imperial military forces defeated Ottoman troops to occupy Ottoman territory in Palestine.  After the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919, Allied politicians agreed that Palestine

By Amara Thornton
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Before the end of the First World War, plans were begun by the Palestine Exploration Fund, working with the British Academy on behalf of the Foreign Office, to open a new British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem.  The Palestine Exploration Fund had been supporting British archaeological research in Ottoman Palestine since 

by Amara Thornton

With the creation of the Mandate for Palestine and Transjordan, the Mandate government began encouraging tourists to travel to the Middle East to see the archaeological sites now maintained and cared for under British authority.  In his capacity as Director of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine and Director of the British School, John Garstang wrote "Digging in Sacred Soil", a series of articles published in the Illustrated London News in the early 1920s, 

By Amara Thornton
 
Petra had captured the public's imagination for over a century before the Petra expedition of 1929. The man widely credited with first describing Petra for Western readers was the Swiss traveller and explorer Johann Ludwig