Augmented digitization of Appendix 27 ("Colonisation and Hellenisation") from Hansen and Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis

Augmented digitization of Appendix 27 ("Colonisation and Hellenisation") from Hansen and Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis

These files are an augmented digitization of Appendix 27 ("Colonisation and Hellenisation") from Hansen and Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. They contain both the Pleiades ID (PID) for each colony and metropolis, insofar as one exists, and the Polis Inventory number, again insofar as one exists (since not all the founders or colonies are poleis).

The initial digitization of the appendix into a spreadsheet was done with the aid of Gemini, and then corrected, cleaned, and prepped for data work by hand in Google Sheets; all subsequent work was done in Python without use of AI (the Jupyter notebook is available here, although it can't actually be run without the relevant source files). Locations were programmatically associated with their PIDs where possible, and then further matching, disambiguating, and correcting was done by hand. A caveat: there are likely still some incorrect identifications! Please feel free to submit corrections. The matching of Polis Inventory numbers (here labeled as HNID) was also done programmatically, drawing the IDs from a JSON file provided by the IOS app of the Polis Inventory, in turn derived from the Stanford Polis Project.

File Downloads

• CSV or JSON of Appendix 27, with added data
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• Corrections to Hansen-Nielsen:
• row added: foundation of Sybaris at Traeis by exiled Sybarites (see Hansen-Nielsen pp.297–8)
• data added: Chersonesos in Pontic Skythia founded by colonists from Delion or Delos (see Hansen-Nielsen p.942)
• data corrected: Ainos in Thrace founded by colonists from Alopekonnesos (not Alopeke), Mytilene, and Aiolian Kyme
• File bundle for importing the colonies, metropoleis, and directed edges (connections from founder to colony) into QGIS (also derived as part of the workflow detailed above).
• Instructions (assuming that you have QGIS 3.44+ already installed):
• Install the Notebook plugin for QGIS
• Unzip the file
• Adjust the file paths in the Jupyter notebook for the file locations on your computer: only change source_path and save_path in the first notebook cell (the source path should be the location of your unzipped files; the save path should be where you want the resulting Geopackage file to be saved, which can be the same as or different from the source path)
• Open colonizing_expeditions.ipynb (using the Notebook plugin) in a new QGIS project, and run the full notebook
• Each place is represented by at least one point, polygon, or linestring; if multiple instances of a given geometry exist in Pleiades, only one was retained, but a place may exist as more than one geometry type
• N.B. The linestrings created between metropoleis and colonies are straight lines, rather than geodesic curves, but they can be densified if desired

Licensed under CC-BY-4.0.

Version history

• v1.0 (2026-07-25): original upload