Survey of Western Palestine

The Palestine Exploration Fund is a British society based in London. It was founded in 1865 and is the oldest known organization in the world created specifically for the study of the Levant region, today now known as Palestine. Often simply known as the PEF, its initial object was to carry out surveys of the topography and ethnography of Ottoman Palestine with a remit that fell somewhere between an expeditionary survey and military intelligence gathering. Consequently, it had a complex relationship with Corps of Royal Engineers, and its members sent back reports on the need to salvage and modernise the region.

The beginnings of the Palestine Exploration Fund are rooted in a literary society founded by British Consul James Finn and his wife Elizabeth Anne Finn. Many photographs of Palestine have survived from this period.

On 22 June 1865, a group of Biblical archaeologists and clergymen financed the fund, with initial funding of £300. The most notable of the founders were Arthur P. Stanley, the Dean of Westminster, and George Grove, who later founded the Royal College of Music and was responsible for Grove's Dictionary of Music. Its founders established the fund "for the purpose of investigating the Archaeology, Geography, manners, customs and culture, Geology and Natural History of the Holy Land."

Frederick J. Bliss wrote of the foundation that "[a]s far as its aims were concerned this organization was but a re-institution of a Society formed about the year 1804 under the name of the Palestine Association... it is interesting to note that the General Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund recognized an organic connection with the earlier Society."

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