Theodore Edward Dowling, Archdeacon in Syria, opens his 1913 booklet with a personal travel diary: on Tuesday in Easter week, 1912, he left Haifa for Caesarea, then Jaffa, and reached Gaza in nine and a half hours—an unusually quick journey. This first-person frame, complete with named hosts and local collaborators, sets the tone for a work that blends pilgrimage narrative with antiquarian compilation. Dowling explicitly credits the Rev. Dr. and Mrs. Sterling for hospitality and local knowledge, the German Father Gatt for printed articles, and the British Consular Agent for official reports. The preface thus establishes the book as a patchwork of eyewitness testimony, scholarly borrowing, and grateful acknowledgment, rather than a unified academic history.

A Chronicle of Successive Rulers

The book’s structure follows a linear chronology from the Philistine period to the early 20th century, but the excerpts reveal a particular interest in the Ottoman pashas who governed Gaza from about 1510. Dowling notes that seven pashas ruled for over two hundred years, making Gaza the capital of Palestine under Hussein Pasha around 1660. He describes their arbitrary methods: if a house or object caught a pasha’s eye, he would claim it with the word “Mabrook” (Blessed), and an unfavorable reply meant immediate hanging. The pashas’ fine buildings—the serai, barracks, minarets—still stood in Dowling’s day, but their descendants were poor, living on rents. This section illustrates how Dowling weaves together architectural remains, local memory, and a sense of decline.

Dagon and the Architectural Puzzle

In a chapter on the Philistine god Dagon, Dowling quotes R. A. Stewart-Macalister’s 1905 reconstruction of the Gaza temple. The structure, Macalister argued, had three parts: a cella, a deep distyle portico, and an open forecourt. The blind Samson, led to the forecourt, could be seen by Philistine lords in the portico shade while a crowd watched from the roof. Dowling does not resolve the biblical account’s ambiguities but instead presents this archaeological hypothesis as a plausible architectural setting. The passage shows his method: juxtaposing scriptural narrative with modern scholarly conjecture, without claiming certainty.

The Difficulty of Gathering Facts

Throughout the excerpts, Dowling repeatedly signals the limits of his sources. He writes that it was “extremely difficult to obtain this scanty information about the Gaza Pashas.” He notes that he had not seen Dr. Martin A. Meyer’s 1907 history until after his manuscript was complete, and then incorporated “some additional information” from it. His reliance on local informants—the C.M.S. catechist, the consular agent, the Latin priest—gives the book an oral-history texture, but also a provisional quality. Dowling does not pretend to have uncovered a definitive record; instead, he presents what he could gather, often in short paragraphs that read like annotated notes rather than flowing narrative.

Dowling’s Gaza is less a continuous history than a collection of fragments—travel diary, consular reports, biblical archaeology, and local anecdotes—held together by the author’s presence as a visitor and compiler. Readers should approach it as a period document that reveals how a late Victorian clergyman-scholar assembled knowledge about a storied city, rather than as a comprehensive or critical history. The book’s value lies in its specificity: the names of informants, the descriptions of buildings still visible in 1912, and the candid admissions of what could not be known.