Fund it
Support the founding stage
A founding grant pays for the first team and the first anchors. Early funders shape what gets built first.
The problem
Everyone argues about this land’s history. Few can check the sources.
People argue about the Holy Land’s past in newspapers, classrooms, parliaments and at the dinner table.
The evidence they argue over is scattered across archives, excavation reports and libraries on three continents, and written in Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Syriac, Ottoman Turkish and more. Most readers meet it secondhand, already arranged to support a side.
The Atlas puts the evidence itself on a map, where anyone can find it.
The core
Truth anchors
A truth anchor is one fact about one place at one time: who lived there, who ruled it, what it was called, what stood there.
Each anchor sits on the map with the evidence that demonstrates it: the source in its original language, a translation, and a citation. An anchor holds what the evidence can show and what scholars from every community can agree on. Scholars review each one before it goes up.
Stage one
Build the anchors
Sourced facts, laid out across place, time and peoples. This is the Atlas itself, and the heart of the project.
Stage two
Write from the anchors
Essays, symposia and longer studies take up the hard questions. Every claim in them links back to an anchor, so a reader can check each step of the argument.
What you could trace
Questions people ask, followed through the sources
Some questions come from one community and some from another. The Atlas answers each the same way: place by place and period by period, with the evidence attached.
- Jewish communities in GazaFrom antiquity through the medieval and Ottoman periods to 1929, and from Gush Katif to 2005.
- The Arab villages emptied in 1947–49When each was emptied, what the sources record about how, and what stands there today.
- How the Arab population of the land grewFrom the Nabataeans and Ghassanids before Islam, through the conquest and the Ottoman era, to the British Mandate.
- The name “Palestine”From Herodotus and the Roman province to the Islamic district of Filastin, the Mandate, and today.
- Jewish life between the Romans and ZionismSafed, Tiberias, Hebron, Peki’in and Jerusalem across seventeen centuries.
- Christian BethlehemThe town’s churches, pilgrims and Christian families over the past century.
- Jerusalem’s quartersWho lived where, including the Jewish Quarter after 1948 and the Mughrabi Quarter in 1967.
- One place, many namesShechem, Neapolis and Nablus; Beit She’an, Scythopolis and Beisan.
Three ways in
Place
Zoom
Move from the whole region to a valley, a city, a single site. Each level brings its own detail and its own stories.
Time
Move through the periods
Keep the same landscape and change the century. Watch who lived there, who ruled it, and what it was called.
Peoples
Follow a community
Choose Jews, Arabs, Samaritans, Druze, Christians, Circassians or a people of the past, and the map traces where they lived and moved.
Who builds it
Scholars from every community
The Atlas is founded by Zev Farber, a scholar of the Bible and the ancient Near East and Senior Editor at TheTorah.com.
It will be built by historians, archaeologists and philologists of every background, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze and others, working in the region and beyond it. Each period gets its own coordinator. Native speakers edit the Arabic and Hebrew editions. A scholarly board decides which sources ground the Atlas and how its peoples are described.
Where things stand
The project is at its starting line
Exists now
The idea, a written design, and scholars and institutions who want to take part.
Missing
Funding. The project has none yet and no staff.
Next
A founding grant, a small team, and the first anchors.