Outcomes
Now that all places mentioned in Herodotus' Histories are in a database, the text's spatial data can be queried and the results represented in GIS. Below we provide a sample of the kinds of maps that can be produced, along with a brief analysis. Users wanting more information can find out more by consulting the following publications:- Mapping an ancient historian in a digital age: the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Image Archive (HESTIA), Leeds International Classical Journal (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/classics/lics/)
- Herodotus Earth: Mapping and Networking the Histories, Iris 2010 (http://www.irismagazine.org/)
- Herodotus Earth: The ancient world in Google, Amphora 2010 (http://www.apaclassics.org/outreach/amphora/mission_statement.html)
Single point maps in GIS
The most basic maps that are generated simply represent a flat image of the spatial data, marking all the places that Herodotus mentions over the course of his work with a single point, and divided according to three different kinds of spatial category, settlement, territory and physical feature. In this form the data can give a snapshot of the scope of Herodotus' world, identify toponyms when at a sufficient level of detail, or represent the world in any given book.
A further level of sophistication can be added by building a query that counts the number of times places are mentioned, and depicting the results by using the symbology function in GIS to scale them according to frequency. For example, the figure below represents the category of settlement, each of which is scaled according to the number of times each is mentioned over the course of the Histories. At a glance it is possible to identify the settlements most salient to Herodotus' story: as depicted by the large purple circles they are: Athens, Sparta, Delphi, Miletus, Sardis and the islands of Samos and Salamis.
Database-generated network maps in GIS
Since the above maps have little to say per se regarding Herodotus' organization of space, a key next step has been to produce rapidly-generated networks based on the simple co-presence of toponyms in a sentence. The purpose of producing these kinds of maps is not to prove anything about the network culture of Herodotus' day, since the places are connected by virtue only of being mentioned in the same breath, as it were. Rather, they are meant as a stimulus to investigate the connections that Herodotus himself makes between places, to explore how strongly the narrative is bound to geographical regions, and to flag up potential links between particular locations. (The following image depicts a close-up of the network culture of settlements in the Histories.)
The picture below illustrates one such simple network, that for the subdivision of countries with the broader territory category across the entire Histories. It shows a series of links connecting Greece to other areas within the Mediterranean world: but the territory that has the strongest connections in this basic network culture is Egypt. While surprising, it does make sense on reflection, since for a better part of one book Herodotus uses Egypt as the touchstone against which other cultures, including Persia and his own, Greece, are compared. It is as a tool of comparison, then, that Egypt appears to be the centre of Herodotus' network picture of the Mediterranean.
