New from AWMC: The Geography of Pliny the Elder
Screen capture of the AWMC map, showing points, areal features, and labels on the southwest Anatolian coast and offshore islands, as far west as Astypalaia.
The Geography of Pliny the Elder compiles and maps the geographic data in Pliny's Natural History. The database, available for download from the ISAW website, includes some 6,500 unique entries, and this application maps all those entries that are locatable. Users can click on a feature or use the search function to find citations in Pliny and a link to a feature's associated Pleiades entry, where further data, much of it beyond the scope of Pliny, can be found.
The map is displayed using ESRI's free online viewer. The geography (terrain, coastlines, and river courses) are derived from tiles compiled by the Ancient World Mapping Center and currently hosted at the University of Iowa. These tiles represent scholarly consensus regarding the shape of the ancient world. Location data (i.e. geographic coordinates) are derived from Pleiades.
The application was developed by Grace Bell, Gabe Moss, Brian Turner, Richard J. A. Talbert, and the staff of the Ancient World Mapping Center. Special thanks to Tom Elliott, Henry Gruber, Ryan Horne, Phil McDaniel, and Gracie Riehm.
Learn more about the allied project that led to this dataset and map application in the blog post "Pliny the Elder's World".
