The First World War gave an enormous impetus to reconnaissance, photography, and air‐photo interpretation which was carried over into peacetime by archaeologists who had seen its potential. Aerial reconnaissance and photography were swiftly applied in the Near Eastern theatres, from Gallipoli to Persia. The scale of aerial photography during the First World War is staggering – and massively surpassed in the Second. In the postwar period, there were immense numbers of aerial photographs, thousands of aerial cameras and large numbers of people who had worked routinely with aerial photographs and often acquired expertise. The RAF undertook aerial photography over the frontier region with Vichy Syria. Southern Syria and Jordan offer additional forms of military site – those in which forts are part of an extensive settlement. Aerial photographs of Antioch allowed something of the planned landscape beyond the city to be defined and suggested the original Hellenistic cadastral system.