An initiative dedicated to further the standardisation of metadata entities and associated vocabularies in cuneiform studies.
View the Project on GitHub cdli-gh/glow_vocabularies
Geography Working Group
Rune Rattenborg, Sebastian Borkowski, Manuel Molina, Jamie Novotny, Susanne Rutishauser
The location entity defines any discrete, physical location of an archaeological nature. Being a geographical entity, a location may or may not be associated with an historical place, which may in turn be associated with one or more names.
A location, as understood here, corresponds in part to the provenience entity typically included in digital text catalogues in cuneiform studies. For a typical example of the latter, see the table of proveniences as employed by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. The notion of location employed here differs, however, in that it makes a distinction between a provenience with a known geographic location and a provenience without a known geographic location. The latter entity is considered an historical place in the present data model (see for a description of this entity the specific entry on place).
When limiting location to known geographic locations, the entity corresponds more seamlessly to general archaeological features constituting site records in archaeological gazetteers, which will generally not include entities without a known geographic location.
The extended conceptual meaning of this entity as employed here is derived in large part from the location entity type of the Pleiades: A Gazetteer of Past Places repository. As such, the use of this entity need not be limited to finds of cuneiform inscriptions, but indeed to any known archaeological feature of relevance for a given data collection.
The stable URI format for location records in Pleiades are described in more detail in the Pleiades documentation. Here, location URIs are subordinated to a single parent place record.
In a Wikidata ontology, this would correspond to the Wikidata item Q839954 archaeological site or a more specific subordinated item, next to a dedicated item record for the specific place.
Being a geographical entity, a location record should always include a geographical coordinate utilising the WGS84 coordinate reference system. A geographical coordinate includes longitude (x) and latitude (y), stored as decimal degrees. A geographical coordinate should always be accompanied by a definition of observational certainty made according to a known ordinal value set. For a location, observational certainty should reflect the geographical precision of the geographical coordinate, not the certainty of association between the location and an ancient place.
| name | description |
|---|---|
| longitude | Longitude (x) of the location geographical coordinate in decimal degrees |
| latitude | Latitude (y) of the location geographical coordinate in decimal degrees |
| certainty | Degree of geographical precision of the location geographical coordinate |
| cdli | Identifier of the corresponding entity record in the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative |
| pleiades | Identifier of the corresponding entity record in Pleiades |
| wikidata | Identifier of the corresponding entity record in WikiData |
Apart from the recommended basic fields described above, a wide range of external identifiers can also be optionally included.
| name | description |
|---|---|
| geonames_id | Link to the corresponding record in GeoNames |
| osm_id | Link to corresponding record in OpenstreetMap |
| osm_type | Type of geometry associated with osm_id in OpenstreetMap. Three different types of vector geometry are employed, namely node, way, and |
The Cuneiform Inscriptions Geographical Site Index (CIGS) provides an exhaustive and thoroughly linked index of known locations where cuneiform has been found. For a description of the index, see Rattenborg et al. 2021
Ancient Records of Middle Eastern Policies (ARMEP) provides an excellent web map search interface for proveniences of cuneiform texts. Locations are derived from [Pleiades] (see below), where corresponding data records can be found
The Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts (BDTNS), provides a web map visualisation of in-house provenience and collection records
Pleiades: A Gazetteer of Past Places is a leading historical geographical database for Classics, but also with an increasing number of records for the Middle East and adjoining regions. The database holds upwards of 35,000 place records.
For open access indices of archaeological locations in the Middle East, see the most recent version of the ANE Site Placemarks for Google Earth and the description of the index given in Pedersén 2012