What Happens When Everyone Is Writing the Same Book You Are? - The New York Times - 0 views
-
It was as if the story were floating in the air, waiting to be rediscovered. And by coincidence, a handful of writers came across it at the same time.
-
That was nearly everything I knew of him. All my family had left of his adventure in Jerusalem was a black box of papers telling a captivating tale.
- ...13 more annotations...
-
an encounter between Monty and an eccentric Finnish scholar, Valter Juvelius, who claimed he had identified ciphers in the Old Testament that showed where the ark was hidden in Jerusalem. He wanted to go and find it;
-
Monty, a veteran of the Boer War and a son of a wealthy politician, had the connections and credibility to make it happen.
-
Monty gathered investors, permissions and a team, and in 1909 the “Parker expedition” started digging in Jerusalem for the ark, a holy relic whose value — immeasurable — Monty promised to split with the Ottoman government.
-
A mosque attendant, appalled, caught the diggers in action and rumors began to fly, scandalizing members of the city’s various faiths.
-
I started to research the story, not knowing that my explorations made me a member of a curious, modern-day venture that paralleled its historical counterpart: the Parker expedition writers.
-
the events of the expedition’s aftermath — including the revelation, shocking to Jerusalem’s Muslim residents, that corrupt Ottoman officials were aiding the British explorers — add depth to our understanding of the factors influencing the emergence of Palestinian nationalism.
-
My grandfather gave her a few photos and documents, and in 1996 she staged an exhibition on the Parker expedition, her paper on it making her a key contact for everyone who came to the story later, looking for sources.
-
She welcomed each of us who wrote to her as though she were our party host, passing on news of our fellow expedition explorers and enjoying the coincidence that these books were all happening at once.
-
Nirit emailed with a smiling emoji about “the new guy in town”: Brad Ricca, an author in Cleveland who writes books that blend fact and fiction. And four months after that, my dad was sitting down for dinner one evening when Nirit rang to introduce him to Lior Hanani, a young Israeli software developer who chose the expedition as the basis for his debut novel.
-
Graham shared a scoop he’d found in the British archives: Monty had a diagnosis of neurasthenia, what we’d now call PTSD.
-
In 1995, Nirit, then early in her career but with characteristic resolve, tracked down a box of glass negatives from the expedition, enlisted a student to locate the great-grandson of Valter Juvelius in Finland and reached out to my grandfather in England.
-
The expedition may have had an impact on British foreign policy in the region, Andrew said when we talked, and it helped spawn the world’s ongoing fascination with the ark of the covenant (and Indiana Jones). It illustrates how people at the time viewed the Bible, science and chronology, Timo explained over Zoom, and why secret ciphers might have made sense to them.