The Land of Moab

Record summary

Henry Baker Tristram’s 1878 travel and natural-history work records ruins, caves, sacred sites, local narratives, and environmental conditions around Moab and the Dead Sea. It provides a documentary route into nineteenth-century accounts of places considered dangerous, cursed, inhabited, or historically charged, while also illustrating how unusual phenomena could receive geological, zoological, or biblical explanations. Tristram was a clergyman-naturalist, so biblical interpretation and colonial-era ethnography shape the presentation. Specific supernatural claims must be located in the original passages rather than inferred from the landscape.