Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients (TAVO) Placenames in Pleiades

The Ancient Near East in Pleiades

by Tom Elliott — last modified Jan 14, 2014 10:16 AM Copyright © The Contributors. Sharing and remixing permitted under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (cc-by). 

We have recently accessioned some data derived from the Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients (TAVO) by an external project. Here is the status of the work, some context, and a call for volunteers. 
 

This past weekend we finished indexing a batch of data relevant to the study of the ancient Near East that was imported a few months ago. The data was derived from the gazetteer to the Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients (TAVO) and prepared by Francis Deblauwe and Eric Kansa under the auspices of the Gazetteer of the Ancient Near East (GANE) project, which was organized by the Alexandria Archive Institute and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This data ingest brings 2,545 new placename variants and 179 new geographic locations into Pleiades [Click thru for links to each of the TAVO-related Place resources in Pleiades]. In order to encapsulate and contextualize these Names and Locations in Pleiades, 106 new Place resources were created and 206 existing Place resources were updated and enhanced. The new placenames are drawn from 45 different ancient and modern languages, but due to their derivations from the TAVO index, they and are largely transliterated or Romanized in some way; many additional/alternate Romanizations were added by the GANE team in order to enhance the value of the dataset for search and digital reuse and remixing. The data were further enhanced with the addition of references not only to the TAVO index, but also to Wikipedia. Because of the small scale of many of the maps in TAVO and the correspondingly limited horizontal resolution of the coordinates provided in the TAVO index, the locations were imported as bounding boxes corresponding to TAVO map grid squares rather than as points. They are only relevant for the 106 new Place resources, since Pleiades already held Locations with getter horizontal resolution for previously cataloged Places...

For context, here is a map showing these "TAVO-enhanced" Places along with all the other Pleiades Places (purple circles) that fall in the same general area.