The “Mesopotamian Ancient Place-names Almanac” (MAPA) focuses on the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk (modern Warka). It is one of the earliest mega-cities in world history, with evidence of settlement as far back as the 4th Millennium BCE. Uruk possesses some of the earliest attestations of the cuneiform writing system, and boasts of being the royal seat of the legendary king Gilgamesh. MAPA is a first step in integrating textual sources with remote sensing data for reconstructing the social and physical geography of Mesopotamia in the Age of Empires (first millennium BCE). The core of the project is a gazetteer of place names in texts and surveys, both on the ground and via satellite.
The dataset, 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. 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.
site_ID A unique 4-digit durable numerical identifier, assigned to each unique place.
label A four letter identifier, drawn from the document’s title. The letters are drawn from the spelling of the title. The first letter indicates the type of feature in question: S indicates a settlement, W indicates a hydrological feature, C indicates a piece of urban infrastructure, G indicates an agricultural floodplain, and B indicates a Bāb (gate, or lock connected to a canal or river) or Bīt (estate, alternatively the settlement area of a tribal group).
title The accepted normalised form of the ancient placename in contemporary academic literature, i.e. the spelling used in reference materials. This is taken as the “name” of the feature.
variant_Akkadian The syllabic Akkadian spelling of the toponym’s name, as written in Babylonian texts. This accommodates further searches in the ancient sources. There are often numerous spellings, which are listed here set off by semi-colons.
type The type of feature under discussion. These are listed according to the ontology of the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus or AAT (getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/aat).
sub_type A more specific description of the feature, as much as is possible. These are listed according to the hierarchies elucidated in AAT. Like “type,” this section will expand and evolve as understanding of the region increases through the project.
title_source The primary modern citation for the information in the document. These are listed by citation key, referencing the BibTex and RIS files in this release.
t-s_pages For ease of querying, the pages of the entry in the above source.
Uruk_relation A text field, with notes of the feature’s location in relation to Uruk, as recorded in the title_source text.
Uruk_probability The probability of the location notes specifically, and the information in the document generally, being correct. This is according to the information in the title_source text.
place_terms This column records, for ease of use, the names of generic geographic features included within the names of individual places. This includes Kār (Quay), Tīl (Tell), among others.
determinatives This field records the determinatives from the ancient Babylonian spelling of the placename, i.e. d (Dingir) preceding divine names.
language Records the linguistic background of the placename, using ISO 3-letter language codes. See links to SIL.org.
language_prop Records any uncertainty regarding the data in langauge.
proper_nouns Names of people, gods, and professions, primarily, contained within the name of the place in question.
p-n_type Type of noun recorded in proper_nouns: Divine names, personal names, professional names, or general appellatives.
p-n_type_prop Records any uncertainty regarding the data in p-n_type.
variant_modern The modern (usually Arabic) name given to the feature, if it is known. It is recorded here both romanised and in the original Arabic.
notes A text field which contains information deemed important to the gazetteer, but which did not neatly fit into the existing categories. This can include variant spellings of the title among the various title_sources, literature references, multiple iterations of an identical spelling, among others. Context of the LOC_details is also recorded here.
LOC_details Records the way in which the title place connects to the places recorded in the LOC fields. Each field is treated in turn, set off by semicolons. These are intended to be direct and succinct; additional context, such as directionality, is recorded in Notes.
LOC-x These fields, up to 5 at this point, are other toponyms in the gazetteer which are connected by a text or texts to the feature in question. They are recorded here by site_ID. Uncertainty is recorded in LOC-1_probability, while other probabilities are recorded in Notes.
ccode The ISO two-letter country code of the location.
CDLI Where relevant, the CDLI Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative provenance number.
Pleiades Where relevant, the Pleiades reference number (https://pleiades.stoa.org/).
We are continuing to enrich the gazetteer. Additional instances for each entry are being added, according to the most up-to-date textual editions, as well as unpublished references, and linking them to the gazetteer. We are also curating site biographies for each of the ancient canals around Uruk. The biography describes each settlement in both physical and social terms: what kinds of social groups are active there, what are their main economic activities, and what natural features, agricultural systems, and technologies are attested there. Most interesting are the outgoing and incoming elements in each site (documented e.g. in administrative texts or correspondence). As these biographies are assembled, new information or connections that come to light will likewise be added to subsequent iterations of the gazetteer.
This research was supported by the the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 457/19).
We would like to thank Ariel M. Bagg, Michael Jursa, Ran Zadok, Francis Joannès, and the team at Achemenet for providing us with text summaries and transliterations of texts from the relevant periods.
We would also like to extend our appreciation to our partners at Pelagios, especially Elton Barker, Gethin Rees, and Simon Rainer, for their constant support and technical consultation.
Lastly, thanks to Karl Grossner from the World Historical Gazeetter, who assisted us with conforming to the JSON-LD based Linked Places format.
Gordin, Sh. and Clark, S. 2022. Mesopotamian Ancient Place-names Almanac 1.0 (https://github.com/DigitalPasts/MAPA)
This repository is made freely available under the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license. This means you are free to share and adapt the repository, under the conditions that you cite the project appropriately, note any changes you have made to the original repository, and if you are redistributing the repository or a part thereof, you must release it under the same license or a similar one.
For more information about the license, see here.
Adams, Robert McC., and Hans J. Nissen. 1972. The Uruk Countryside: The Natural Setting of Urban Societies. Chicago: University Press.
Bagg, Ariel M. 2020. Die Orts- und Gewässernamen der neuassyrischen Zeit, Teil 3: Babylonien, Urartu und die östlichen Gebiete. RGTC 7, Vol. 3. Weisbaden: Reichert Verlag.
Cocquerillat, Denise. 1968. Palmeraies et Cultures de l'Eanna d'Uruk (559-520). Berlin: Mann Verlag.
Ermidoro, Stefania. 2016 “New Data on the Babylonian Hydraulic Landscape: An Update to the Répertoire Géographique des Textes Cunéiformes Vol. 8.” Kaskal 13: 135–74.
Kleber, Kristen. 2008. Tempel und Palast: die Beziehungen zwischen dem König und dem Eanna-Tempel im spätbabylonischen Uruk. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.
Zadok, Ran. 1985. Geographical Names According to New- and Late-Babylonian Texts. RGTC 8. Weisbaden: Reichert Verlag.
Zadok, Ran. 2020. “New Documents about Uruk, its Countryside and the Sealand”. In: Des polythéismes aux monothéismes. Mélanges d’assyriologie offerts à Marcel Sigrist. Ed. by Uri Gabbay and Jean Jacques Pérennès. Études Bibliques NS 82. Leuven: Peeters, 491–534.