“…Jerusalem was imagined as an ideal realm ± the seat of wisdom and divine majesty. It was no accident that as the English, Dutch and Germans established colonial enclaves in North America, Africa and the Paci®c, the use of names such as`Salem',`New Canaan' and`Zion' multiplied on the colonists' maps (Lowance 1980). How great the shock, then, in 1798±9, in the wake of Napoleon's disastrously unsuccessful invasion of Egypt and Palestine, when Protestant travellers and scholars drawn to the Middle East by a de facto British occupation of Egypt first encountered Jerusalem's contemporary reality (Silberman 1982: 18±27).…”