Mesopotamian Ancient Place-names Almanac (MAPA)
Doing Historical Geography in the Age of Linked Open Data
NCBT 666 (2 Camb = 528 BCE)
150 kurrus of barley (and) 150 kurrus of dates (for a) total of 300 kurrus of barley and dates, the tithe of the mār-banîs of the territory of Bīt-Amūkāni between Uruk and Babylon, without crossing the Takkīru canal and the Royal Canal, together with the tithe of Dihummu, the general tax farmer of Bīt Amūkāni, the property of Ištar-of-Uruk and Nanaya, are owed by Bāniya, son of Innin-šumu-u[sur], descendant of Gimil-Nanaya.
Beaulieu, P.A., 2013. Arameans, Chaldeans, and Arabs in cuneiform sources from the Late Babylonian Period. Berlejung, A. and Streck, M.P. (eds.) Arameans, Chaldeans, and Arabs in Babylonia and Palestine in the First Millennium BC (LAOS 3), Wiesbaden, p. 40
“Mesopotamian Ancient Place-names Almanac” (MAPA)
- Historical geography of Mesopotamia in the age of Empires
- Aiming to incorporate both textual and remote-sensing data for large scale relational mapping of the landscape
- Gazetteer of place-names that will be linked to thousands of Neo/Late-Babylonian everyday texts
Deltaic city of Uruk (modern Warka, Biblical Erech)
The Urukean Landscape
imittu “impost”
zittu (ha.la) “share"
sutu “rent”
ša muhhi sūti “rent farmer"
Satellite images of the city of Uruk (left) and its surrounding landscape (right); visible ancient canals are marked in purple
Assembling the Gazetteer V1.0
Assembling sporadic registers into one dataset based on the Linked Places format of the World-Historical Gazetteer platform and Pelagios network; a JSON-LD syntax (both RDF and Geo-JSON, with a temporal spect)
Linked Open Data Model: Pleiades
Text Editions
Experimental pipeline from Akkadian text transliteration in ATF format to tagged TEI/XML via Recogito .
Islamic Geography as a Model: al-Thurayya Project
- Free GitHub based website; data availability (CSV; JSON-LD)
- Markdown templates for ATF texts as well as website data
- Networks overlaid on a map as well as without maps
- Single view of a site and its linked places
- Landscape features on the ground (in Akkadian) are visualised in wheel hierarchies
Network visualisation of Uruk landscape based on Gazetteer data vs. historical geographical reconstruction of a subset of Uruk texts (Cocquerillat 1968)
"Was the Sumundar canal a watercourse that brought water from a western channel of the Euphrates? The textual evidence suggests otherwise, pointing to the area of the Tigris." (Abraham and Gabbay 2013, 189)
