LAMGIS
Late Antique Mesopotamia was home to several communities that shaped world history: the Church of the East, a rabbinic community that created the Babylonian Talmud, a Persian community that ruled an enormous empire, an Arab community that was pivotal in the medieval Muslim empire, and more. Unfortunately, Late Antique Mesopotamia is poorly studied. Its sources are scarce, fragmented, and divided across expertise in different languages and historical contexts.
LAMGIS (Late Antique Mesopotamia: A GIS Approach) aims to fill this gap from a spatial point of view. Combining historical research and GIS with AI-assisted data extraction and management, LAMGIS seeks to consolidate existing knowledge and identify connections between sources. The final goal is an interactive map and gazetteer containing all available information from historical and archaeological sources. What places were significant for the region’s different communities? How were the same places portrayed and shaped by different communities? These are some of the questions the project will help answer.
Research in progressThe LAMGIS project blog →Follow the methods, decisions, and development of the project.Methods, programs, and code will be accessible through a designated GitHub repository. Coming soon
Project progress
0. Setting goals
- Selecting corpora and data sources✓ Done · still evolving
- Deciding the area of interest✓ Done
- First milestone: a new map of the Babylonian Talmud’s MesopotamiaGoal
1. Research infrastructure
- Project dashboardEvolving
- Digital data harvest mechanismMethodology — coming soon✓ Done
- Printed gazetteers databasing mechanismMethodology and code — coming soon · “How I databased a book” — forthcoming✓ Done for one gazetteer · evolving
- Curated Talmudic textual variants extraction mechanismConcept set · awaiting execution
- Bulk place-name extraction from sources translated into EnglishPlanned
- Bulk place-name extraction from sources in Syriac, Greek, and Hebrew scriptsPlanned
- Places reconciliation based on toponymy and locationConcept set · awaiting more data
- Interactive map for presenting all dataPlanned
2. Places from the Babylonian Talmud
- Database of Talmudic place names based on Oppenheimer, Babylonia Judaica (1983)✓ Done
- Add all place-name variants in textual witnessesPlanned
- Update Oppenheimer’s database using recent scholarshipPlanned
3. Syriac sources
- Harvest data from Syriaca.org✓ Done
- Add places mentioned in the Synodicon Orientale, documents from Church of the East synodsPlanned
- Add places from English translations of Syriac chronicles and martyrologiesPlanned
- Add places from untranslated Syriac sourcesPlanned
4. Greco-Roman literature
- Harvest data from ToposTextPlanned
- Add places from scanned late antique Greco-Roman sourcesPlanned
5. Abbasid literature
- Harvest data from Damast and al-Thurayya✓ Done
- Add places from Abbasid historiographiesPlanned
6. Incantation bowls
- Add places from the British Library corpus of incantation bowl textsPlanned
7. Ancient Mesopotamian sources
- Harvest data from the MAPPA online gazetteer✓ Done
- Database printed gazetteersPlanned
8. Other
- Harvest, compare, and reconcile places from the World Historical GazetteerPlanned