Palestine as a palimpsest: Eusebius' construction of memorial space in the Onomasticon

Eusebius of Caesarea’s Onomasticon, an encyclopaedic compilation of Biblical place names, is believed to have been intended as an instrument for the exegesis of Scripture. The list, however, incorporates a large amount of information that relates to late antique reality and does not contribute to illuminating the meaning of the Biblical text. The Church Father has blended together two chronological layers, that of the Biblical past and that of his own times, to bring the events of sacred history into the present and reconfigure Palestine as a Christian memorial landscape. This technique feeds into his apologetic agenda, that is, to claim the Jewish past and the Holy Land for Christianity. Yet Palestine had already been inscribed with many historical events and various memories by different rulers and ethnic and religious groups. Thus the aim of the Onomasticon was to wipe out all these memories anchored in geographical space and replace them with the Christian view of history. The result is that Palestine is transformed, as it were, into a palimpsest, a semiotic landscape that is constantly revised and rewritten