Hierokles' Synekdemos Map (Back) Online
Over on BlueSky, AWMC Director Gabriel Moss announces:
Exciting news for folks interested in Late Antiquity and GIS. AWMC's map of Hierokles' Synekdemos (offline since 2023) has now been refurbished and relaunched. Special thanks to Grace Bell for *lots* of heavy lifting on this project.
Hierokles was a Byzantine geographer of the 6th century CE to whom the Synekdemos is attributed. The work provides a detailed list of the cities and provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire at that time and is therefore an important source for its administrative and territorial geography. Augmented by information from other sources, it formed the basis on which the Barrington Atlas compilers structured Map 102: Dioceses and Provinces of the Roman Empire according to Hierocles (late 5th–early 6th centuries A.D.).
The "about" page on the new version of the map provides the following additional information:
Following the text of Ernst Honigmann’s 1939 edition, the map marks all cities and regions that may be identified and located with at least some confidence according to the Barrington Atlas. Initially published in 2017, the current version of the Synekdemos web-map was refurbished by Grace Bell and Dr. Gabriel Moss and re-released in 2026.
The accompanying screen capture shows a portion of the map covering southwest Asia Minor and nearby islands. Several black dot symbols can be seen on map. One of them has been selected and is displaying a pop-up that shows information about the corresponding place, which is titled "Podaleia". The information includes the Pleiades ID number (639065) and a link to the corresponding entry on the Pleiades website, as well as the diocese (Asiane), province (Lykia), Hierokles reference (683,8) and Barrington Atlas reference (BA 65 D4).