MANDATORY PALESTINE AND THE MIDDLE EAST

A superb collection of rare photographs of Palestine and the Middle East.

[Photograph album, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt, c. 1930s.] 135 photographs (approx. 60 x 81 mm.), with manuscript annotations, mounted on 14 leaves, oblong 4to (211 x 275 mm.). (1 lightly creased, a few coming loose from mounts). Original full leather, decorated in colours to upper cover showing a pyramid scene and in blind to lower cover (extremities very lightly rubbed).

Beginning in Palestine, this album moves through the wider Middle East, taking in Damascus, Homs, Palmyra, and Aleppo in Syria, Beirut and Baalbek in Lebanon, Baghdad and Mosul in Iraq, and Cairo in Egypt. Included in the section on Palestine is a group of rare and unusual photographs of ‘Jewish Agricultural Settlements on the Plains of Sharon and Esdraelon’. This group, which shows the cultivation of farm land by Jewish men and women, also includes an image of the Girls Agricultural Training School, a facility established in order to address educational discrepancies between the sexes and to enable girls to train in typically male vocations. Another group of photographs shows oranges being grown and harvested in a kibbutz on the Plain of Sharon. Other photographs in the album depict a number of tourist sites such as the ruins of Palmyra and the copper bazaar in Baghdad, as well as images of an oil gusher spouting and the perpetual natural gas fires in the Kirkuk district of Iraq.