Bliss, Frederick Jones, 1859-1937

Frederick Bliss was the second oldest child of the well-known American missionary Daniel Bliss, the founding president of Syrian Protestant College in Beirut (now American University of Beirut). Bliss attended Amherst College in Massachusetts and then Union Theological Seminary in New York.

After training under Flinders Petrie in Egypt, Bliss became involved with the Palestine Exploration Fund working in the field of Biblical archaeology at the site of Tell el-Hesi between 1894 and 1897, while concurrently leading an expedition that dug in Jerusalem, where he collaborated with A. C. Dickie. Between 1898 and 1900, along with R.A.S. Macalister, Bliss excavated several sites in the Shephelah region of modern Israel, helping to improve the chronology of the region. He was dismissed as the head of the Fund in 1900 due to a disagreement with his peers over the handling of artefacts retrieved from archaeological digs and their transferal to Istanbul at the behest of the Ottoman authority.