To Survey the Land, He Left His City and Other Proverbs

From the third millennium BC onwards, the scribes of the ancient Near East generated a large corpus of written records. The known 500,000 objects carrying cuneiform inscriptions cover a great number of different types of texts, ranging from administrative records and receipts to love songs, omen readings, astronomical observations, medical texts, political propaganda and more. Mentions of individuals, places and geographical features provide information which can be used to map the ancient world, support prosopographical studies and bring to light the networks which criss-crossed the area known as the Fertile Crescent. The geospatial representation of Mesopotamia is nothing new: housed at the British Museum is one of the oldest extant geographic maps, of Late Babylonian origin and dated to approximately the mid-first millennium BC. Other ancient documents from the area record the locations of agricultural fields next to named canals and other geographical features, whilst historical narratives track the movements of individuals and armies across genuine and mythological landscapes. Indeed, some major urban centres are only known from literary records and are still to be located by archaeologists the ancient written documents forming thus the only available source of data. Our research examines the potential of combining these different types of records via Linked Data, harnessing a new technology to shed light on the ancient past.