Charles Warren vs. James Fergusson

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In case you think that only modern archaeologists are prone to controversy and disagreement, you should revisit the bitter dispute between James Fergusson and Charles Warren, two giants of their day, involving nothing less than the location of Solomon’s Temple and Christ’s Tomb.

Today Fergusson is the less well-known of the two, but in the mid-19th century he was a major figure in the field of architectural history. After making a fortune 060producing indigo in India, he was able to retire to London after just ten years. While traveling around India on a series of tours from 1834 to 1845, Fergusson painstakingly measured and recorded many of its ancient buildings. In 1876 he published his landmark History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, which is still a basic reference work and remains in print. His major achievement was to present Indian architecture to western readers on a par with “the other great styles, which have ennobled the arts of mankind,” as he justly remarks in his preface. His studies led him to undertake a critical survey of world architecture, which was first published in two volumes in 1855 under the title The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture, Being a Concise and Popular Account of the Different Styles of Architecture Prevailing in All Ages and Countries. This was expanded into a set of four volumes, entitled A History of Architecture in All Countries from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, which appeared in print from 1865 and instantly became a bestseller.

It was only natural that Fergusson would develop an interest in Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. But he was not the only one. Until the middle of the 19th century, the Temple Mount, called by Muslims the Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), was out-of-bounds to non-Muslims. Only a few daring European visitors managed to breach the ban.

Western interest in the ancient Near East was awakened, however, by the remarkable rediscovery of the Assyrian palaces by Paul-Émile Botta, Austen Henry Layard and other pioneering excavators in the 1840s and 1850s. Some of their discoveries, such as the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (which depicts Jehu, king of Israel, paying homage to the Assyrian king on one of its panels), shed new light on the world of the Bible. Finds like these created a thirst for more artifacts linked to the Scriptures.

At about the same time, Mehmet Ali, the autonomous pasha of Egypt who controlled Palestine, liberalized the policy forbidding non-Muslims to enter the Temple Mount. In 1833, the English architect and graphic artist Frederick Catherwood, dressed as an Egyptian officer and armed with a document from the governor of Jerusalem describing him as an engineer in the service of Mehmet Ali, succeeded in spending six weeks on the Temple Mount with two companions. Under this cover, they managed to study the Dome of the Rock, the al-Aqsa mosque and other monuments on the Mount, and also to produce the most accurate plan of the Haram al-Sharif until that time. Their descriptions and drawings had a strong impact on the European public. Fergusson was among the first to snatch up Catherwood’s drawings.

Earliest Temple Mount Drawing

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Based on its Byzantine features, Fergusson identified the Dome of the Rock as the original rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre, built in the fourth century by Emperor Constantine. He contended that this building, and not the mostly Crusader-era Church of the Holy Sepulchre, was the genuine burial-place of Jesus. He also argued that Solomon’s Temple had been located not where the Dome of the Rock now stands, but at the southwest corner of the Temple Mount. In his work, An Essay on the Ancient Topography of Jerusalem, published in 1847, where he first presented his theory, Fergusson necessarily relied on the plans and descriptions of Catherwood. He read considerable significance into the fact that the western wall of the Triple Gate passage and the southern wall of the elevated inner platform of the Dome of the Rock were both approximately 600 feet from the southwest corner of the Haram enclosure, and generated almost an exact square.¹ Now 600 feet is approximately identical to one stade (stadium), equivalent to 400 cubits or 600 Roman feet, which—as Fergusson pointed out—the first-century C.E. historian Josephus gives as the dimensions of the Temple area in the Herodian period (late first century B.C.E.-first century C.E.). Josephus thus defines the circumference of Herod’s Temple as four stades, each side one stade in length.² Further, Josephus states that the length of Herod’s Royal Stoa (basileios stoa), which lined the southern side of the Temple enclosure, was a stade in length.³ Yet again, this same ancient writer records that Solomon’s Portico, which ran along the 062eastern side of the enclosure, was 400 cubits, or one stade long.⁴ Fergusson deduced that the eastern and northern traces of this square were preserved in the later structures marked on Catherwood’s plan. He correctly noted that both Robinson’s Arch on the west side and the Double Gate on the south side of his square were relics of ancient entrances to the Temple Mount. However, he also assumed (wrongly as it turned out) that the topography of his square area was flat and that the rock surface was visible at the surface of the Haram along its entire southern edge.

Fergusson’s Reconstruction of Temple Mount

Charles Warren, on the other hand, was a relative latecomer to this scene. In 1866, he was a 27-year-old lieutenant of the Royal Engineers. His principal experience was in Gibraltar, where he maintained the British fortifications, designing new ones as needed and conducting a detailed survey of the Rock of Gibraltar, using a standard procedure known as triangulation (in which a baseline is measured and then the positions of other points in a specified area are fixed by measuring all the angles in a chain of triangles, relative to the baseline).

Warren’s abilities were recognized by his superiors, and he was recommended to the director of the Ordnance Survey, Sir Henry James. When the newly organized Palestine Exploration Fund sought a Royal Engineer to head a new expedition to Jerusalem, Warren was a natural choice.

There is a somewhat involved story behind Warren’s appointment. In the 1850s, an Italian military engineer named Ermete Pierotti, who had been ignominiously discharged from the Piedmontese army for embezzlement, was engaged as architect and engineer to the Ottoman authorities in Jerusalem. This role gave him unrestricted freedom to study the Temple Mount. In 1864 Pierotti published a book, entitled Jerusalem Explored, that included descriptions of the structures, underground cisterns and conduits on the Mount.

Pierotti’s book came to the attention of George Grove (1820–1900), probably through his close friend Fergusson, because Pierotti had plagiarized some of the plates from Fergusson’s earlier publication. Grove was one of those remarkable Victorians whose knowledge and interests ranged over many fields.⁵ He is mostly remembered as the founding editor of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the standard reference work. Incidentally, when Fergusson remarked to Grove that no full concordance of the names in the Bible existed in English, Grove created one. In 1859 and again in 1861, Grove 063visited the Holy Land. He also wrote much of the content for Sir William Smith’s encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible, issued in three volumes between 1860 and 1863.

At about this time, an English baroness named Angela Burdett-Coutts, scion of a prestigious banking family, offered to provide Jerusalem with a clean and reliable water supply. Grove succeeded in persuading her that a survey of Jerusalem was a necessary prerequisite for a new water system, and she agreed to fund it.

In 1864, an Ordnance Survey Team was dispatched to Jerusalem under the able leadership of Captain Charles Wilson of the Royal Engineers. The Ordnance Survey, Britain’s national mapping agency, was launched in the 18th century by the Board of Ordnance (the name of England’s defense ministry at that time) to survey that country’s strategically vulnerable southern coasts. The Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem was to be undertaken with the same precision and level of detail as the Ordnance Survey mapping then being carried out in Great Britain.

Various officers of the Royal Engineers were asked to head the expedition to Jerusalem, but most declined because they considered the terms too onerous. The endowment of £500 had to cover all salaries and expenses, including travel costs for the six Royal Engineers making up the survey party. Wilson was the first officer to accept the assignment, and many of his colleagues thought that he was foolhardy to do so.⁶ Sure enough, Wilson was out of pocket by the end of the expedition, but his reputation was firmly established.

The main results of the survey were a 1:10,000 map of Jerusalem and its environs and a 1:2,500 plan of the walled city so accurate that when a new one was made in 1937, only a revision of Wilson’s 1865 map of the city was necessary.

Fergusson separately funded a map of the walled enclosure of the Temple Mount. This produced the first reliable map of this compound, to a scale of 1:500.

In 1866, Wilson published the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem detailing the results of his work.

Buoyed by the accomplishments of the Survey, Grove proposed the founding of a “society for the systematic exploration of Palestine.” Grove’s plea for a learned organization dedicated to exploration in the Holy Land was echoed by Sir Henry James, head of the British Ordnance Survey, who wrote in The Times of London on December 31, 1864 about the exciting discoveries that were being made by Wilson’s expedition. James expressed the hope that funds might be forthcoming to enable such work to continue. On May 12, 1865, the Dean of Westminster organized a meeting held in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey and presided over by the Archbishop of York, at which it was agreed “that an Association be formed, under the title of the Palestine Exploration Fund, for the purpose of investigating the Archaeology, Geography, 064Geology and Natural History of Palestine.” Grove became Honorary Secretary. On June 22, 1865, the PEF was formally established.

An appeal for funds was made and the response was immediate. Queen Victoria, who sent a donation of £150, consented to become Patron of the Fund.

In a second expedition to the Holy Land from October 1865 to June 1866, Wilson made a preliminary reconnaissance of northern Palestine that convinced him that a survey of the entire land would take years and was, in any event, beyond the financial resources of the new organization. Moreover, many of the founding subscribers were more interested in the questions left open by Wilson’s Ordnance Survey, particularly over the location of Solomon’s Temple and the authenticity of the site of the Holy Sepulchre. The most prominent members of the Fund engaged in debate over Fergusson’s controversial theories concerning these issues.

On his return from the east, Wilson was elected to the directorship of the Palestine Exploration Fund and was also asked to join the Ordnance Survey Office; he was thus unavailable for further work in Palestine. Charles Warren was chosen to lead the new expedition to Jerusalem, at the recommendation of his commander. The tasks presented to Warren included carrying out excavations to settle the issues mentioned above and to produce a map of the city’s environs that would facilitate a military reconnaissance.⁷

Warren, accompanied by three corporals of the Royal Engineers, sailed to Palestine in February 1867. Almost immediately, his expedition ran into strong opposition from Nazif Pasha, the Ottoman governor of the Holy City. Soon after his arrival, Warren received a letter from the Grand Vizier in Constantinople authorizing him to conduct excavations everywhere in Jerusalem, with the exception of the Haram al-Sharif and other sites sacred to Christians and Muslims. Nazif Pasha took advantage of these exclusions in the Ottoman Turkish permit, however, to impede Warren at every turn. Finally, after difficult negotiations lasting two years, Warren succeeded in overcoming local opposition to excavations around the perimeter of the Haram. He also ended up paying bribes to the governor’s entourage.

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Since he was not permitted to excavate on the Temple Mount itself, Warren excavated outside the walls. He sank vertical mine-like shafts connected at the bottom to underground tunnels that ran in the direction of the Temple Mount walls.

To some, the local Muslim opposition to his work around the Haram was understandable. John (“Rob Roy”) Macgregor, who captured public attention in Victorian Britain through an adventurous canoe trip down the Jordan River, wrote in The Times on April 5, 1869:

Nor can we wonder that the Turk should refuse a stranger leave to dig quite close to his cherished sanctum. Even the Dean of Westminster, so valuable a co-operator on the committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, would be reluctant to allow a Turkish officer of Engineers to dig by the east buttresses of Westminster Abbey.

Even the area immediately adjacent to the enclosure was holy to the Muslims. Warren was able to skirt this obstacle by digging most of his shafts at a considerable distance beyond the enclosure walls of the Temple Mount, and then tunneling horizontally toward the walls.

Warren was chronically short of money, a problem exacerbated by the fact that he was required to pay bribes to the local authorities. After ten months in Palestine, Warren had spent £2,100 and had only received £1,050 from London. With a family to support back in England, Warren was driven to despair. From the PEF came the exhortation: “Give us results and we will send you the money.” Warren replied with justified indignation: “Give me tools, materials, money, food, and I will get you results.” His pleas were answered with the refrain: “Results furnished, and you shall have the money!”⁸

Warren spent two summer months of 1868 back in England. When he left again for Jerusalem, he took his wife and baby daughter with him, and they stayed there together for the remainder of the expedition. While in London, he arranged for a regular stipend to be sent to him, but this was hardly enough to cover his expenses. By the end of the expedition, total costs had risen to £8,000. This sum supported a complement of four to six non-commissioned officers of the Royal Engineers, 20 to 50 Arab laborers, the purchase of timber for mining frames and all other expenditures over three years.

Warren and his team also labored under continuous physical danger. As Warren explained in a letter to Walter Besant, the acting secretary of the PEF and an accomplished novelist, dated June 10, 1870:

The work at Jerusalem has been one of constant danger and anxiety, and is totally different to mining in natural soils among civilised men. The fellahiçin [local laborers] could only be induced by degrees to go under the ground and then in time of danger were worse than useless.

We had however in our daily labor to trust ourselves entirely to these fellahiçin, all the hauling up had to be done by them and our lives were in their hands: now though these men can be brought into working order they cannot be made careful, and the hair-breadth escapes of each man of our party were numerous: on more than one occasion an iron crow bar weighing over 20 lbs. was let slip down the shaft just missing Sgt. [Henry] Birtles, and stones were allowed to fall back again when just at the top of the shafts: and when it is remembered that many of these shafts were from fifty to a hundred feet deep the danger from such an accident will be understood.

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But besides the carelessness of the Arab workmen was the danger of digging in an artificial soil; a soil composed of layers of earth, shingles, stone chippings and broken ashlar, resting at different angles; on some occasions after going along a layer of earth we would come suddenly upon the ashlar, each piece weighing several tons, which crashed in our frames: on other occasions the shingle would suddenly burst in like water, burying our tools and sometimes partially our workmen.⁹

The fill that surrounded the Haram enclosure was largely composed of stone fragments from destroyed structures, separated here and there by layers of earth that had collected in times of peace. This debris formed the shingle described above by Warren. It had no cohesion and tended to flow into the shafts, while large stones scattered through the fill threatened to crash through the wooden cases and scaffolding. In places, these deposits were contaminated with sewage, which caused wounds on the limbs of the workmen to fester.

The shafts sunk into this fill were rectangular, from 3 to 4 feet across, and were lined with the wooden mining cases, which resembled large open wooden crates. Initially, Warren procured mining frames from Malta, but the Mediterranean softwood did not endure the Jerusalem climate and rotted after a few weeks. Subsequent frames supplied from England proved durable. The mining cases were fixed to one another in series as the depth of the shaft was increased. Galleries were driven horizontally along the bottom of the shafts and lined with mining cases. Warren’s attention to working procedures and imposition of discipline ensured that there were no fatalities and few serious accidents, which was remarkable because some of the shafts were 067of considerable depth, up to almost 125 feet, and the horizontal galleries were also of very considerable length, up to 600 feet. Occasionally, foul gases filled the passages and fresh air had to be pumped down to sustain the workmen. Most accidents occurred when laborers flouted Warren’s instructions, as on one occasion when a workman climbed up a shaft on the frame timbers against the rules and fell down and broke his back.

The below-ground exploration around the Temple Mount enclosure revealed that the ancient walls had survived to a far greater height than had been believed previously. At the southeast angle, for example, while the visible part of the wall above ground was 65 feet high—counting both the ancient courses and the medieval ones—the excavations showed that an additional 80 feet were buried in the artificial fill.¹⁰ Near the southwest corner a shaft had to be sunk 90 feet in order to reach the foundations.¹¹

Warren made especially interesting discoveries in the vicinity of Robinson’s Arch, the name given to the spring of a large arch slightly to the north of the southwest corner of the Haram.¹² Seven shafts were sunk in a line across the Tyropoean Valley, westward from the arch. At the deepest point bedrock was 75 feet below the present surface, so great had been the accumulation of earth and spoil over the centuries. At the bottom of the valley, Warren discovered a rock-cut canal, now known to be part of a network of drainage channels dating from the Herodian period (late first century B.C.E.-first century C.E.) that skirt the Western Wall of the enclosure.¹³ West of this channel, Warren found the foot of a large masonry pier that had supported the other end of Robinson’s Arch. Several of the arch voussoirs (wedge-shaped pieces) were found resting on the pavement, where they had fallen; digging through the pavement, Warren discovered two voussoirs from a different, smaller arch.

Warren was convinced that Robinson’s Arch formed part of a large stairway supported “on piers and arches” that led down from Herod’s Royal Stoa, mentioned by Josephus,¹⁴ to the suburbs below.¹⁵ Warren correctly connected this with the exit from the Temple Mount that descended “by many steps going down the ravine and from here up again to the hill (i.e. the Upper City).”¹⁶

Warren correctly deduced that Herod had built this impressive stairway when he enlarged the Temple enclosure.¹⁷ Warren sketched reconstructions of this grand stairway that are still in the archives of the Palestine Exploration Fund;¹⁸ one is signed and dated January 1, 1868, and the other is attached to two letters sent together by Warren to the PEF, dated October 11 and 12, 1867. The second drawing was also printed in the Proceedings and Notes (1865–69) of the Palestine Exploration Fund.¹⁹

Subsequent scholars, however, took the view that 068Robinson’s Arch formed part of a raised viaduct or bridge across the Tyropoean Valley joining the Temple Mount to the Upper City. Warren’s reconstruction was simply forgotten. Only after Israeli archaeologist Benjamin Mazar excavated this area in the late 1960s and 1970s was Warren’s view corroborated. Brian Lalor, who was Mazar’s architect at the time, explained in a letter to me that when he joined Mazar’s excavation in 1969, “the bridge theory was firmly espoused by the excavation team.”²⁰ After studying the archaeological evidence and precedents from Roman architecture, Lalor deduced that Robinson’s Arch was part of a stairway and, with some difficulty, managed to sway the excavation team to his view. However, neither he nor Mazar knew at the time about Warren’s similar conclusions, made a century earlier.^a

Although Warren could not dig on the Haram itself, he struck up a good relationship with its Muslim guardians. This enabled him to carry out a thorough examination of the Dome of the Rock, and of many of the subterranean cisterns within the enclosure.²¹ The largest of these cisterns, which Warren referred to as the “Great Sea” (al-Bahr al-Kabir in Arabic), number VIII in Wilson and Warren’s sequence of cisterns and underground chambers, occupies an area of about 424,000 cubic feet.²²

John Macgregor has left a colorful eyewitness 069account of Warren exploring cisterns within the Haram:

Mr. Warren, indeed, seems to have a subterranean turn of mind, and it is fortunate when one’s duty and one’s inclination are both in the same direction. To-day we were privately visiting the Haram enclosure, where the level sward of green is gorgeous with spring flowers in bouquets here and there round the old pillars or marble blocks. Suddenly Mr. Warren resolves to raise one particular stone of these, and ropes, levers, and ladders were speedily at work. The old Sheikh of the Temple Area…sits restless on the grass, now and then groaning deeply, as he sees the Englishman disappear into a great cavern, the last of the cisterns examined in this hollow-sounding, grassy square. After measuring this below, by swinging to and fro on a rope in the hollow gloom fitfully lit up by his magnesium light, Mr. Warren entered a small hole in the turf above, where one could scarcely expect a terrier to go in, taking leave of us all, with a good-humored joke to the anxious Sheikh, who forced a grim smile into his face, evidently half-fearing, half-worshipping the mysterious intruder he was set to watch…After 20 minutes of suspense we heard a cheerful “Hallo!” far off and in a totally unexpected direction, and there was Mr. Warren erect again on the surface some hundred yards away, having traversed a new passage under the grass in total darkness, and creeping on his side. A bit of magnesium was given to the grave Sheikh in reward for his easy guardianship. The old man took it like a child, and thanked the giver, but with a more audible groan.²³

This light-hearted sketch suggests that Warren was far from the stern, archetypal military man and that he had an amiable personality—the photo on page 54 shows him in a relaxed mood with some of his colleagues in Jerusalem in 1867. His sense of humor, combined with bravura, is perhaps best illustrated in his account of his exploration of an ancient channel filled with sewage running south from the double Struthion Pool,²⁴ which is located beyond the northwest corner of the Haram:

I, however, determined to trace out this passage, and for this purpose got a few old planks and made a perilous voyage on the sewage to a distance of twelve feet, to a bend from whence I could see a magnificent passage cut in the rock, leading due south, thirty feet high, and covered by large slabs or stones laid horizontally across. Finding the excessive danger of planks, I procured three old doors, and proceeded with Sergeant Birtles to our work. The sewage was not water, and was not mud; it was just in such a state that a door would not float, but yet if left for a minute or two would not sink very deep; at the same time a plank would go down rapidly with one’s weight on it. We laid the first door on the sewage, then one in front of it, taking care to keep ourselves each on a door; then taking up the hinder of the three it was passed to the front, and so we moved on…

After advancing sixty feet, we came to a dam built across the passage retaining the sewage on the north side four feet higher than to the south; here we drew up our doors and stopped some minutes to get breath.

Everything had now become so slippery with sewage that we had to exercise the greatest caution in lowering the doors and ourselves down, lest an unlucky false step might cause a header into the murky liquid—a fall which must have been fatal—and what honour would there have been in dying like a rat in a pool of sewage?²⁵

Warren also investigated other sites in Jerusalem, adding to the information that had been accumulated during Wilson’s Ordnance Survey of the city, especially about the walls, gates and aqueducts. Warren also sunk several shafts on the Ophel, where David’s 084City was situated, which slopes southward from the Temple Mount toward the Pool of Siloam.²⁶

Perhaps the most enduring contribution of Warren’s explorations was bringing to light the topography of the ancient city, which lay hidden beneath thick layers of debris, to the extent of concealing the Tyropoean Valley (west of the Temple Mount) and hiding or distorting other natural features. Indeed, Warren’s descriptions and drawings of the topography of Jerusalem and of its ancient walls are still used by archaeologists.

Warren’s Temple Mount Plan

In 1871, a year after Warren’s return to England, a volume encapsulating the results of his explorations was issued by the PEF under the title The Recovery of Jerusalem, edited by the treasurer, Walter Morrison. Warren separately published in 1876 a popular account of his work in the Holy City, called Underground Jerusalem, which included some of his views on the location of the Temple in relation to the existing Haram al-Sharif. In contrast to Fergusson, Warren believed that the boundaries of the Herodian enclosure coincided with those of the Haram except towards the north, where he thought that the ancient boundary followed the present northern edge of the inner platform of the Dome of the Rock.

Financial constraints delayed the publication of the definitive account of Warren’s explorations by the PEF until 1884. This appeared in print as the Jerusalem Volume of the Survey of Western Palestine, together with a large folio atlas, bearing the inelegant title Plans, Elevations, Sections, etc., Shewing the Results of the Excavations at Jerusalem, 1867–79. The Jerusalem Volume was put together with the considerable assistance of Claude Conder, who took command of the Survey of Western Palestine from 1872 to 1876. The portfolio of plates is today simply referred to as the “Warren Atlas.”

Warren’s explorations were conducted before archaeology became a science, and the concept of stratigraphy was as yet unheard of. There were no excavation methodologies or dating techniques, such as pottery sequences, to guide him, so Warren was unable to establish reliable chronologies for his finds, which included a large quantity of ceramics and other minor objects. Occasionally he and his team did irreparable damage to archaeological remains, as when they blasted the fallen voussoirs of Robinson’s Arch and broke up Herodian paving stones in the course of descending to the channel beneath. But to criticize some of Warren’s methods is to judge with the benefit of hindsight.

Warren disproved Fergusson’s proposal that Solomon’s Temple was located in the southwest part of the Haram enclosure. That the Temple had not been there was clear from the ancient topography: The area of the southwest part of the Temple Mount had been part of the deep Tyropoean Valley up to the time that Herod the Great had filled it up to incorporate it into his expanded Temple scheme.²⁷ Solomon’s Temple (and Herod’s) must have been situated on the elevated inner platform of the Dome of the Rock, which marks the summit of a spur and is the highest natural feature within the enclosure. This location is in accordance with the testimony of Josephus, the first-century C.E. historian, that the Temple was built at the top of the “mountain.”²⁸ Having fixed the site of the Temple, the second main plank of Fergusson’s theory, that the Dome of the Rock was the original Church of the Holy Sepulchre built by Emperor Constantine, automatically collapses. More recent studies at the traditional Church of the Holy Sepulchre have brought to light and elucidated the Constantinian origins of that church.²⁹ Moreover, careful research on the Dome of the Rock conducted from 1873 onwards has shown beyond doubt that it was built as an early Islamic shrine, and dedicated in the 72nd year of the Muslim era (691–692 C.E.).

But Fergusson refused to accept Warren’s conclusions with good grace. He persisted with his theories, which he publicized in a book entitled The Temples of the Jews and the Other Buildings in the Haram Area at Jerusalem, published in 1878. In it, he tried to disparage Warren’s work and mischievously dragged Wilson into the vendetta:

The praise of accuracy must be understood as applying only to the work of Major Wilson…The surveys of Captain Warren…have only been published in rough lithographs executed from tentative drawings sent home by him during the progress of the survey, or in a popular manner, and on a small scale, in a work entitled The Recovery of Jerusalem 1860. As neither of these make any pretensions to scientific accuracy, Major Wilson has undertaken to republish his Notes, incorporating Captain Warren’s work with his own. The difficulty, however, of reconciling the two has been so great that the task has been indefinitely delayed, and may not improbably have to be abandoned.³⁰

Fergusson brazenly continued:

Major Wilson informs me that he has found it impossible to protract Captain Warren’s data in such a manner as to agree with the Ordnance Survey (of Jerusalem).³¹

These charges provoked a furious response from Warren. In a letter to the PEF, Warren challenged Fergusson’s accusations and, more particularly, the comments attributed to Wilson.³² He requested that a special subcommittee of the PEF be appointed to determine whether the plans he sent from Palestine “can be considered as ‘tentative drawings’ without pretension to scientific accuracy” and “whether there are any grounds for the remark imputed to Col. Wilson, that he found it impossible to protract my work so as to agree with his own.”

The subcommittee was duly set up and in the end vindicated Warren. Wilson himself ultimately denied that he made the remarks imputed to him. The chairman of the committee even expressed the hope that Warren’s drawings, when published, would appear as his own work. The definitive report of Warren’s work appeared in 1884 as part of the Survey of Western Palestine, with an accompanying album of maps and plans based on Warren’s drawings; Claude Conder served as co-author.

In the meantime, however, while the subcommittee was deliberating, Warren rushed to press with an exposition of his side of the argument. Published as The Temple or the Tomb; Giving Further Evidence in Favour of the Authenticity of the Present Site of the Holy Sepulchre, and Pointing Out Some of the Principal Misconceptions Contained in Fergusson’s ‘Holy Sepulchre’ and ‘The Temples of the Jews’, Warren savagely attacked his antagonist’s raft of theories. He was merciless in his counterattack. On the very title page of his book, Warren flung back in Fergusson’s face a jibe that the latter had earlier directed at another distinguished scholar for affirming the traditional location of the tomb of Jesus at the spot marked by the rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre:

It would be demanding a little too much from human nature to ask any one in his position to confess the errors of his ways, and to admit the success of a rival.³³

Fergusson never responded, and that was the end of the controversy. He turned his mind to other architectural problems and, in 1883, published The Parthenon: an Essay on the Mode by Which Light was Introduced in Greek and Roman Temples. His fiery 085temperament inevitably caused Fergusson to become embroiled in further acrimony. His acute disagreement with a distinguished scholar of Indian archaeology, Dr. Rajendralala Mitra, over the Buddhist rock-cut caves near Cuttack in the eastern Indian state of Orissa (dating from the pre-Christian era), prompted Fergusson to publish a pointed critique entitled Archaeology of India, with especial reference to the works of Babu Rajendralala Mitra in 1884. James Fergusson died in January 1886, two weeks short of his 78th birthday.

Ill health forced Warren to return to England in the spring of 1870. It took him four years to rid himself of fever and fatigue, and his departure from Palestine brought the expedition to an end. By 1877, however, he had recovered sufficiently to accept a position in South Africa to delimit a boundary between the British and the Boers. He also saw action in the Cape Frontier War of 1877–78, sustaining severe injuries in combat.

In 1882 Warren was asked to lead a search party to find the orientalist and explorer, Professor Edward Palmer, and his companions in Sinai. They were found murdered. Warren tracked down the culprits, local Bedouin tribesmen, who were duly punished.³⁴ For his services as leader of the Palmer search expedition, Warren was made Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (K.C.M.G.) in Queen Victoria’s Birthday Honors in 1883, the first of three knighthoods that were bestowed on him.

The new Sir Charles returned to South Africa as administrator of the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland. In 1886 Warren was appointed commissioner of the Metropolitan Police of London, a post that he held for two years, dealing with such matters as the security arrangements for Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee and the notorious Whitechapel (“Jack the Ripper”) murders.

From 1899 to 1900, with the rank of Lieutenant-General, Warren served in the Boer War as senior divisional commander. He incurred blame for the debacle at Spion Kop in January 1900, when the British forces relinquished a strategic hill to the Boers while attempting to relieve the besieged town of Ladysmith. However, he overcame this setback by forcing a crossing of the Tugela River and renewing the British offensive.

Warren was promoted to the rank of General in 1904 and Colonel Commandant of the Royal Engineers the following year. He lived well into his 80s and died at Weston-super-Mare in 1927. Unfortunately, after Warren’s death, his son destroyed his personal archives.³⁵

I wish to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of my friend and colleague, Dr. Shimon Gibson, with the documentation search in the PEF archives relating to Warren’s work in Jerusalem and to the clash with Fergusson over his findings.

In case you think that only modern archaeologists are prone to controversy and disagreement, you should revisit the bitter dispute between James Fergusson and Charles Warren, two giants of their day, involving nothing less than the location of Solomon’s Temple and Christ’s Tomb. Today Fergusson is the less well-known of the two, but in the mid-19th century he was a major figure in the field of architectural history. After making a fortune 060producing indigo in India, he was able to retire to London after just ten years. While traveling around India on a series of tours from 1834 to […]