New Geographic Data for the Ancient Near East

Last week, ISAW and its partners significantly expanded coverage of the ancient Near East in the online Pleiades gazetteer. Using data prepared by the Alexandria Archive Institute (with financial sponsorship from the National Endowment for the Humanities), the Pleiades team updated over 200 records for ancient places and added over 100 new records. The new data includes relevant time periods, bibliography, and geographic locations, as well as 2,500 placenames in languages like Arabic, Turkish, Akkadian, Farsi, Georgian, and more. The places in question were chosen by their importance and frequency of appearance on maps in the Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients (TAVO).  More information about the work, and links to browse the data, are available in a blog post on the Pleiades website.