Everything on this site is a summary of work done by other people. This page lists the standing authorities we rely on, grouped by the kind of question they answer, so that readers can go past our summaries to the underlying material. Nothing here is behind a paywall, and most of it is written for the general reader.
Reference and encyclopedic works
General encyclopedias remain the fastest way to establish an outline before reading further, and the better ones are edited, dated and signed. For the city itself, the encyclopedic entry on Jerusalem sets out the urban and archaeological history in sequence, and the companion article on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre summarises the building phases from the fourth century to the modern conservation campaigns. The article on the Madaba map explains why a sixth-century mosaic pavement is still the starting point for the topography of the Byzantine city.
For the tradition as a whole, the survey of Eastern Orthodoxy covers doctrine, structure and history at an introductory level. The art-historical entries are similarly useful: Byzantine art for the wider visual tradition, the icon as a category of religious art for the panel painting itself, and Byzantine chant for the modal system and the notation. A short biography of Saint Sabas gives the essential outline of the figure behind the Judean desert foundations.
Museum and library collections
Collection sites are frequently better than textbooks, because they publish photographs, measurements, materials analysis and dating alongside the object. The Heilbrunn timeline essays of art history are a good example: one on icons and their production explains panel preparation, gilding and pigment, and its companion essay on the art of Byzantium places that practice in its long chronology. The Getty collection catalogue is searchable by material and technique, which makes it unusually good for questions about manuscripts and pigments.
For books and documents, the British Library catalogue of illuminated manuscripts shows how medieval codices are catalogued, dated and described, and is the quickest way to learn how to read a manuscript record. The Library of Congress holds large digitised collections of nineteenth-century photographs and travel material relating to the region, much of it freely reusable. Specialist Byzantine scholarship, including publication series and research tools, is gathered in the Byzantine studies resources at Dumbarton Oaks. These collections underpin much of what we say under manuscripts, libraries and treasury.
Primary pilgrim texts in translation
The travel accounts are the closest thing to eyewitness description that survives, and several are available in full in translation. The travel diary of Egeria, written in the early 380s, describes the services of the Jerusalem year in more detail than any other early source, and is short enough to read in a sitting; translations are gathered in the Internet Medieval Sourcebook. The wider Internet History Sourcebooks Project hosts many later accounts alongside it, including medieval traveller narratives and legal and documentary material. We discuss the genre, its conventions and its blind spots on our page of medieval pilgrim accounts.
Heritage and conservation documentation
Conservation files are the most underused source in this field: they are technical, dated, and specific about materials and interventions. The World Heritage Centre publishes a numbered file for each inscribed property, and the file for the church at Bethlehem and its pilgrimage route gathers the nomination dossier, the evaluation and the state-of-conservation reports filed since 2012. The file for the baptism site on the east bank of the Jordan is organised the same way, which is worth knowing because the reference numbers, rather than page titles, are the stable way to cite this material. Reports of this kind are the basis of the twentieth-century entries on our timeline.
How to read older sources critically
Nineteenth-century and earlier accounts are indispensable and must be handled with care. They record buildings, decoration and usages that have since changed or gone, and they are often the only witness to them. They also carry the assumptions of their moment: confident hierarchies of civilisation, casual generalisations about communities, and a habit of reporting rumour as fact. The description can be trusted far more readily than the judgement, and the judgement should be read as evidence about the writer.
Devotional literature has different aims from archaeology, and neither is a defective version of the other. A pilgrim text sets out to convey the meaning of a place to a reader who will never see it; an excavation report sets out to record stratigraphy. Both are useful, but they answer different questions, and a claim taken from one should not be presented as though it came from the other. Where sources conflict, this resource says that they conflict rather than quietly choosing a winner, and the technical terms used in doing so are defined in our glossary. Our editorial standards and limits are set out in full on the about page.