184
April 2018
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
In 1883-4, Kitchener accompanied an expedition and car-
ried out a triangulation from a base at Aqaba to the Dead Sea,
connecting it with the original Palestine control frame-work
near Beersheba. In December 1913, Captain S. F. Newcomb,
RE was given charge of a large surveying and archeological
expedition which started in Gaza and was to cover the entire
Sinai Peninsula. One member of that expedition included T.
E. Lawrence, later known as Lawrence of Arabia! Close re-
marked, “It was doubtless the experience which Lawrence
gained on this expedition that justified his being commis-
sioned into the Director-ate of Military Survey in September
1914, where he was immediately involved in the compilation
of the map of Sinai.” Lawrence’s carto-graphic drafting work
of Israel be-tween Gaza and Aqaba was per-formed in Cairo
where he also interviewed prisoners, processed intelligence
data from agents behind enemy lines, and produced a hand-
book on the Turkish Army.
Although a gridded version (referenced to the Bessel 1841
ellipsoid) of Conder’s one-inch to the mile map series was
used by the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during W.W. I,
there was also a need for larger scale maps of the Palestine
for artillery and tactical purposes. The Brit-ish Forces had no
town maps of some of the key towns of Palestine. Towns situ-
ated beyond the front line, such as Gaza, Beersheba, Ramleh,
and others were photo-graphed by the Aerial Squadrons and
maps of those towns were made. The first map, that of Gaza,
was produced on 25 January 1917, and was probably the first
town-map ever made using aerial photographs. Other maps
produced during 1918, such as those of Nablus and El-Kerek
,were maps that demonstrated a new solution to the problem
of the use of aerial photographs for the purpose of mapping
towns situated in hilly areas. Town-maps for the Palestine
Front were an immediate necessity, not an academic exer-
cise, and the war served as an immediate catalyst. The new
Survey of Pales-tine department (now the Survey of Israel)
was established by the Occu-pied Enemy Territory Admin-
istration after the war, and therefore inherited some good
topographic maps. They were then able to concentrate on im-
proving the triangulation network and connecting it with the
French triangulation in Syria, as well as carrying out cadas-
tral surveys for land settlement.
Under the post-WWI Mandate, Lebanon and Syria (the Le-
vant) were protectorates of France, while Israel and Jordan,
collectively called Palestine and Trans-Jordan, were protec-
torates of Great Britain. As a result, the northern reaches of
Israel are also covered by the Levant Zone. This is a particu-
larly difficult Grid system because it was developed by General
Sevki of Syria and is based on the French Army Truncated Cu-
bic Lambert (partially) Con-formal Conic. Earlier Turkish Ot-
to-man topographic maps of the Levant, northern Israel, and
the Palestine were on the Turkish Bonne Grid. The joins and
transformations among the Levant Zone, the Turkish Bonne,
and the Palestine Grid (mentioned below) are the source of
de-cades of computational heartburn for cartographers; not to
mention my graduate students’ homework problems . . . .
John W. Hagar, formerly with DMA/NIMA, offered that the
Palestine Da-tum of 1928 has its origin at station Number 2
where:
Φ
o
= 31° 18´ 06.27” North,
Λ
o
= 34° 31´ 42.02” East of
Greenwich, the ellipsoid of reference is the Clarke 1880 where
a = 6,378,300.789 meters,
1
/
f
= 293.466004983713280, and el-
evation = 98.9 m. The Cassini-Soldner Civil Grid of 1933 (or-
igin adopted is the principal point 82´M (Jerusalem)) having
the geographic coordinates
f
o
= 31° 44´ 02.749” N,
λ
o
= 35° 12´
39.29” East of Greenwich + 04.200” E = 35° 12´ 43.490”. The
addition of 04.200” to the longitude is in accordance with the
decision in 1928 to adopt the French value for the longitude
at the points of junction 73´M and 98´M in the north, and to
correct all Palestine longitudes accordingly. Palestine longi-
tudes were originally based on those of Egypt at the Transit
of Venus station, and a correction of 3.45” was indicated to
the Egyptian longitudes. Imara Base (1´M or 5´DM) is the
original false origin of the Grid coordinates (i.e., FN = FE
= 100 km) for the Cassini-Soldner Civil Grid. Final imple-
mented Cassini-Soldner False Easting is then 170,251.555 m,
False Northing = 126,867.909 m.
A military version of this system based on the Gauss-
Krüger Transverse Mercator is identical to the Civil Cassi-
ni-Soldner Grid, except for the False Easting at False Origin
where 1,000,000 meters is added, and for coordinates used for
the southern Sinai while it was still occupied by the Israelis,
an additional 1,000,000 meters was added south of the South
False Origin! Of course, that is now defunct.
Hagar further observed that, “I don’t normally pay much at-
tention to the limits of a Grid but here it might be of interest.
North is the 150,000 meter Northing Grid line of the Levant
Zone. This was redefined, probably as a line of latitude, when
the Levant Zone was eliminated. East is the meridian of 39°
E. South is a loxodrome from 19° N, 39° E to 26° 45´ N, 35° E,
thence west on parallel of 26° 45´ N to 70,000 meter Easting
Grid line. West is the 70,000 meter Easting Grid line. You will
see that the Grid is not symmetrical east and west and thus
can be extended into the Sinai which is precisely what Israel
did when they occupied the Sinai.” I have noticed that ellipsoi-
dal loxodromes will warm a professor’s heart, but they general-
ly drive cartographers, and graduate students, nuts!
About 10 years ago, I was teaching my once every other
year grad course in coordinate systems. On the occasion of
a 3-day weekend, I assigned a computational problem for
intersecting ellipsoidal loxodromes with grid lines of a con-
stant value as are found for offshore oil leases in the Gulf
of Mexico as well as the Palestine Grid limits. The problem
is particularly involved be-cause it is iterative between iso-
metric space and in this Louisiana in-stance, Gauss-Krüger
space for UTM. On the first day of class after the holiday, I
had the students pass their homework solutions up to me.
They then nervously asked me to show the solution on the
black-board. I complied, filling about three blackboards with
the computational solution. One of the students in class then
asserted, “Yes sir, that is correct.” Stunned, I thanked the
lady graduate student for the validation! (She later got an “A”
