Daily Archives: 29/09/2024

Given the situation in the Middle East, I’m surprised to realise that I’ve never mentioned The Land and the Book by W. M Thomson, a missionary in the Levant in the nineteenth century. My edition is 1881, but I believe it was first published in 1860. As a fictionalised travelogue of “the Holy Land” with an American visitor, it is intended to relate the geography to the Bible, but of course it accidentally functions as a useful description of the region at that point in the late Ottoman Empire.