In the 19th century, the growing European political and religious interest over the city of Jerusalem is reflected not only by its urban growth but also by the copious cartographic production that depicted its territory over time through the lenses of a western narrative. However, the majority of these non-local mapmakers had a limited amount of time to spend in Jerusalem and a limited access to the places they were trying to depict. As a result, distortions and errors are very common in the maps - especially in the earlier ones - and authors copied extensively from one another in order to complete their work. However, these cartographic errors and their propagation represent a richness that can shed light to a layer of hidden information contained in the maps. In fact, on the one hand, studying the errors and distortions of the western depiction of the city can help us in analyzing the most and least accessible areas for travelers. On the other, the propagation of these errors between maps gives us the possibility of analyzing the partial or complete copying processes.

To support this claim, we analyze more than 100 maps of 19th century Jerusalem with digital cartometric techniques and present a comparative diachronic analysis. In particular, we will present a deformation-based approach to deduct map similarity and misrepresented areas. This methodology employs the homologous points defined in the georeferencing process to define a vector field for each map, that can then be employed as a deformative signature to compare to deduce map correlation. Then, by combining this quantitative aspect with a close reading of the sources and their travelogs we will advance possible hypotheses for the reasons behind specific errors and misrepresentations, and interpretations of the map correlation results.