Following is Robert de Vaugondy’s 1753 map of the Ottoman Empire. Vaugondy maps the empire at its height, with territory spanning from the Black Sea to the southernmost extension of Arabia and west, inclusive of Persia, as far as the Mongol Empire of India. Included are the modern day nations of Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Uzbekistan, and Greece. Vaugondy employed all of the latest geographical information of the time incorporating both French and transliterations Arabic place names. This map offers detail of undersea shoals and reefs in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, mountain ranges, lakes, rivers, and historical sites.
(Click on map image for additional views and details.)
The region of present-day Jordan roughly corresponds to the biblical lands of Ammon, Bashan, Edom, and Moab; it is part of the richly historical Fertile Crescent region.
Around 2000 B.C., Semitic Amorites settled around the Jordan River in the area called Canaan. Subsequent invaders and settlers included Hittites, Egyptians, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arab Muslims, Christian Crusaders, Mameluks, Ottoman Turks, and, finally, the British.
It is among the four most water-poor countries in the world.
The ancient city of Petra (which means "rock" in Greek) was literally carved from the sandstone cliffs of southern Jordan. There the Nabataeans built temples and tombs, houses and halls, altars and aqueducts. And they built a civilization that stood at the crossroads of the ancient Near East, a center for commerce as the spice routes and trading trails of the time all flowed through Petra.
At its peak the city of Petra was home to some 20,000 Nabataeans who, in the midst of the desert, built an ingenious system of waterways to provide their city with the precious liquid.
Since the early 1800s, when it was "rediscovered," clues to daily life in this "lost city of stone" are being unearthed and today we are beginning to see once again what Petra looked like 2,000 years ago.
January 9, 1890
The Freeborn Country Standard
Albert Lea, Minnesota
THE RIVER JORDAN.
A Traveler Recounts His Impressions at the Sacred Stream.
There is possibly nothing more disappointing to the tourist in Palestine than the first sight of the Jordan. This most famous of earthly streams can not be seen until you are upon its very banks. What a disenchantment it was to find ourselves looking into a stream scarcely wider than a creek, with muddy banks and water as muddy as that profane river, the Missouri. It is no wonder that Ninaman referred the limpid river of the north. Some of the party had brought formidable bottles with them, intending to fill them and take them back to America to serve in case of the baptism of infants yet unborn. Bat they were thrown away unused. We almost gave up the project of bathing, but we remembered that we had come six thousand miles, and would probably feel often inclined to say after our return home that we had bathed in the Jordan, even if we did not do so. So, after luncheon, we got ready, slid down the muddy bank and then--had the most refreshing bath of a lifetime. If I had ever had rheumatism I might have felt like a former bather, who said he "imagined himself miraculously delivered of that lingering infirmity" by a bath in the Jordan.
The water was five feet deep and over. The bed of the river is covered with pebbles. The current is exceedingly swift, and we were obliged to use all our strength to keep on our feet in wading to the eastern bank and avoid being carried down stream. We could not swim across. The waters are cold and very sweet to the taste. The channel is about one hundred and ten feet wide at this point. As we stood on the soil of Moab, we looked back and thought of the old hymns which use the river as an image of the line dividing the present from the future life." On Jordan's rugged banks I stand And cast a wishful eye."
The Hudson, the Susquehanna and many other streams are incomparably more useful, but no stream on earth can equal the Jordan in sacred associations. Only pity that the pure, clear water that we saw one hundred and fifteen miles to the north, gushing forth from the base of Mt. Herman at Paneas, should at least have no better fate than to be lost in the Sea of Death.
--Cor. Toledo Blade
