Google Earth .KMZ plots of  📍ancient places.

About



the goal:

To take a geographical snapshot of the entire Middle Eastern and Barbarian world in the first two centuries A.D.


the motto:

"There's no substitute for     🥾🥾boots     👁️👁️eyes on the ground."


the hypothesis:

That the Barrington Atlas' method, is woefully deficient in mapping the MiddleEast, and can be vastly improved, by prioritizing linguistic analysis of place names.


the method:

The lions' share job in making these maps involved simply flying low over the terrain of Google Earth, looking for modern locations which might be evolutionary offshoots of ancient place names, with the assistance of multiple overlaid editions of the Ptolemaic (150 A.D.), Peutinger (1st-5th century), and 19th-century Rumsey Historical maps, as well as a a Greek index, to attempt to avoid red-herring typos, and to get the best sense of the original phonemes which might've been distorted in translation.
I have scrupulously avoided checking the Barrington Atlas, previously regarded as tops in this field, intending to get a compeltely new 'take' on the locations of these sites, so that future people may compare our claims as either cooroborating, or conflicting, without horizontal influence in either direction.


self-critique:

I think that I've generally done an imperfect, but pretty good job of overlapping repositories, as needed, e.g, pasting a city's Peutinger-pin's information into its Ptolemy-pin, and vice-versa. Thus if you find a city in any repository, you're probably going to get all or most of the relevant information from all repositories. The sole exception to this is the Holy Land repository by Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich, which I made so early, that I don't typically included Peutinger or Ptolemaic information. Nevertheless if you want to be 100% sure to get all the information for a particular region, or city, then open simultaneously, in GoogleEarth, all repositories which overlap that region, for which of course the Coverage Diagram is invaluable.
It has also become apparent to me throughout this work, that there are in fact multiple editors of Ptolemy, extending to who-knows-how-late after his lifetime. Thus many of the coordinates do not in fact work together, and it is often better to locate and identify a city, by its own contextual associations, in its own right, rather than upon relative coordinates to surrounding cities. Many of the cities along Northwest Africa, Western India, and Arabia could've probably been better located by me, if I'd've been more open-minded at that time, and less so rigidly tied to coordinates, as I was identifying them.


the author:





No Copyright, 2022.
Citations of David Rudmin are appreciated.