MAPA Gazetteer v. 1.0

Version 1.0 of the MAPA Gazetteer, presented here in CSV and JSON formats, is the presentation of a gazetteer drawn from legal, economic and administrative texts from the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods, issued in and around the Mesopotamian city of Uruk. The listed toponyms were input manually from the books and articles in the bibliography. The gazetteer follows the JSON-LD based Linked Places format of the World Historical Gazetteer. The readme contains a key to the database’s fields, a brief introduction to the MAPA project and its next steps, and a bibliography.

MAPA Gazetteer Version 0.1

The “Mesopotamian Ancient Place-names Almanac” (MAPA) is planned as a long-term project for the 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. The core of the project is made up of a gazetteer of place names in texts and surveys, both on the ground and via satellite. Names in texts will be linked to thousands of Akkadian everyday records, that are available in multiple formats: in transliteration, as summaries in English and German, and in English translation.

The dataset presented here in TSV and JSON formats, is the preliminary presentation of a gazetteer drawn from legal, economic and administrative texts from the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods, issued in and around the Mesopotamian city of Uruk. The listed toponyms were input manually from the books and articles in the bibliography. The gazetteer follows the JSON-LD based Linked Places format of the World Historical Gazetteer. This readme contains a key to the database’s fields, a few issues to be resolved in future iterations, the next steps of the MAPA project and a bibliography.

This research was supported by the the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 457/19)