In Pharaoh’s Footsteps
History repeats itself in General Allenby’s 1918 march on Megiddo
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Footnotes
Armageddon, the site of the final battle between good and evil in the biblical Book of Revelation, probably derives from Har Megiddo, Hebrew for “mountain of Megiddo.”
Endnotes
My description of the battle is indebted to the accounts found in Harold H. Nelson, The Battle of Megiddo (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1920); A Brief Record of the Advance of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force under the Command of General Sir Edmund H.H. Allenby, H. Pirie-Gordon, ed. (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1919); W.T. Massey, Allenby’s Final Triumph (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1920); Raymond Savage, Allenby of Armageddon (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926); Archibald Percival Wavell, The Palestine Campaigns (London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1929); Wavell, Allenby: A Study in Greatness (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941); Cyril Bentham Falls, Armageddon: 1918 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1964); and Brian Gardner, Allenby (London: Cassell, 1965).
George Adam Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, 25th ed. (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931), p. 390.
For the following description of the battle, I am indebted to the accounts found in W.M. Flinders Petrie, A History of Egypt, Volume II: A History of Egypt during the XVIIth and XVIIIth Dynasties (London: Methuen and Co., 1904); James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1906); R.O. Faulkner, “The Battle of Megiddo,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 28 (1942), pp. 2–15; John F.C. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World: From the Earliest Times to the Battle of Lepanto (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1954–1956); James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969); Graham I. Davies, Megiddo (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1986); and Israel Finkelstein and David Ussishkin, “Back to Megiddo,” BAR 20:01.
Harold Nelson’s book on Thutmose III, on which most subsequent accounts rely, is usually cited with a publication date of 1913, which appears on the title page of the volume. But in the preface, Nelson notes that the volume did not actually appear until 1920, because he was “confined behind the Turkish lines in Syria during the whole of the war” (Nelson, The Battle of Megiddo, p. i). So the book could not have been available to Allenby.
Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, 18th ed. (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919), pp. 389–409.
Gardner writes that “Allenby himself studied Palestine with the diligence of a student working for a doctorate, as much as of a General about to conquer the land. Papers which had appeared in The Geographical Journal were requested from his wife in London” (Allenby, p. 127).
See Coutts Trotter’s review of the first edition of Smith’s Historical Geography (1894) in The Geographical Journal 4 (1894) pp. 450–453; see also Smith, Historical Geography (1894), pp. 380–409.
Allenby would also have found other articles in The Geographical Journal of interest, including F.R. Maunsell, “The Hejaz Railway,” The Geographical Journal 32 (1908), pp. 570–585; and Ernest W.G. Masterman, “Palestine: Its Resources and Suitability for Colonization,” The Geographical Journal 50 (1917), pp. 12–32.