Because the ‘Palestine Grid’ is a non-standard projection, I needed to create a new algorithm in MapInfo’s mapinfow.prj file before I was able to register the scans. This showed not only the Golan Heights but also the zone of non-engagement east of the mountains, supplemented with a dataset of major and minor towns from the MapInfo WFS Gazetteer. If you’re after a more historic perspective, The Survey of Palestine under the British Mandate 1920-1948 by Dov Gavish (2005) is available on Google Books as a limited preview.Īfter scanning six paper maps from the 1942 Survey of Palestine at 300dpi resolution, I found a suitable geometry dataset of Asia to build the GIS on DIVA-GIS. As my GIS was going to be about 1948, I was quite happy to use these UN maps as a guide to locate Jewish settlements not yet established in 1942.Ĭliff Mugnier (2000) wrote an excellent article ( pdf) in Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing about the technical details of the Palestine Grid and related Middle Eastern projections and coordinate systems. Here, Israel is located in zone 36 of this reference system. Also worth mentioning is that the United Nations (UN) produced smaller-scale 1:150,000 maps of Israel in the 1970s, using the military Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) grid. Another system, the Palestine Belt, only differs from the Palestine Grid by its use of the Gauss-Krüger Transverse Mercator projection instead of a Cassini, as Dan Savage shows in his table of geographic coordinate systems. As we will see later, the coordinates of this location will be inserted into the configuration file. Hagar, who first used the Palestine datum at ‘station no.2’ in 1928. The Palestine Grid is a non-standard coordinate system developed by John W. Section of Metullah sheet, showing bounded areas, circles and Hebrew labels, as well as transcribed Arabic village names (Survey of Palestine 1942) You can often find bounded areas of potential Jewish development: Jewish settlements were often marked only with circles along with the proposed name in Hebrew, as they were often still at their planning stage. My Palestine GIS was based on historic 1:100,000 maps from the 1942 Survey of Palestine, which showed Arab villages – albeit with labels in English transcription rather than in Arabic. There are some photos of mapping expeditions, levelling instruments, theodolites – and a map of the 1946 triangulation system here. Palestine came under British Mandate 1917 – 1948, with the Survey of Palestine department established in 1918. Lawrence (1913-14 survey of Gaza and Sinai).ĭuring and after the First World War, the British need for more detailed maps of Palestine increased. The northern region of Galilee had already been mapped together with the Lebanese part of Syria as part of the French Protectorate – unfortunately, based on the ‘difficult’ grid system of a French army Lambert projection. Here, two young, aspiring and later successful military figures also received their early assignments, H.H. ?įirst a little historic background: Britain started surveying Palestine and the Levant in the mid-19th century through the Palestine Exploration Fund. I will be assuming basic knowledge of cartographic concepts. The instructions apply to MapInfo 8.0 through to MapInfo 10.0 and will also help if you need to configure other ‘obscure’ coordinate systems.
Mapinfo 10 manual how to#
This tutorial will introduce 1942 Survey of Palestine maps and show you how to set up MapInfo Professional to support the Palestine Grid coordinate system. Most of the following is taken from the 2007 paper I wrote on a GIS of Palestinian population movement during the War of Independence 1948