Key to HGIS

Abu Gam* = Toponym attested only in the sources used for this project. It is presented in an hypothetical form

Whenever possible, toponyms are Romanized to mark the letter "ain" and avoid the use of the letters "e" and "o". It has not always been possible to properly distinguish "j", "g" and "q".

Google Maps allows to display only a limited amount of images per pin, so only a few demonstrative images have been uploaded. Click on the Google Drive link to have access to the full collection of images referring to that particular feature.

The HGIs has ten layers:

1. Rivers and Islands

including the Nile south of Aswan, the 'Atbara, the Rahad and the Dindar rivers. Click on islands to access available information and images.

2. Gazetteer

including settlements, mountains, valleys, cataracts, and other general geographical features. A small black dot marks an inhabited settlement; a small green dot marks a waypoint in the journeys of Linant and Ricci; a small red point marks an undetermined ruin; a white diamond in a black circle marks the seat of an agha/kaimakam; a white square in a black circle marks the seat of a kashif.

3. Alessandro Ricci's Travelogue (Travel to Sennar, 1821)

divided into legs with dates and in two different colours: brown for land travel and blue for river travel. Legs are linear shapes connecting dots, not reflecting possible tracks at the time (distances are therefore approximate).

4. Flora & Fauna

5. Ancient Egyptian Sites

6. Kushite (Kerma, Napatan and Meroitic) Sites

7. Ptolemaic and Roman Sites

including temples in the ancient Egyptian style built during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods.

8. Christian Medieval, Post-Medieval, and Turkiyya Sites (395-1822 CE)

including Christian inscriptions, churches, monasteries, fortresses, diffi-buildings, mosques, and mausolea.

9. Economy & Resources

including crops, livestock, production, trade, and waterwheels.

10. (Cultural) Anthropology

including districts (borders are only roughly outlined for the purpose of indicating which entries belong to which district), ethnicities, and cultural traits. Please check out the layer "Nubia" for a series of outstanding drawings by Linant and Bankes that were labelled "Nubia" without any further indication.

The information displayed

When you click on a pin or an island, the first information displayed is a list of sources (see "The Sources" for more information). Each source will bear a specific reference, the toponym as it appears in the document, and a date of visit.

Some features, especially those now lost to the waters of the various lakes created by the construction of dams along the Nile, will indicate a source for the coordinates and sometimes for the toponym itself. Coordinates were often retrieved using georeferenced maps on QGIS. QGIS was also used to draw the banks of the rivers and the islands.

The detailed references for these maps are available here.

Whenever available, you will find images of the features; these are all drawings by Bankes, Linant, Beechey, Ricci, and Salt kept at the Dorset History Centre or at Kingston Lacy House. Google Maps limits the number of images one can upload to only ten and does not display the name of the image files, so whenever more than a single image is available for the feature, a link will take you to a Google Drive folder with the complete set of images.

For many of the ancient sites there is also an indication of the ID at Pleiades (https://pleiades.stoa.org/) and on the iDAI Gazetteer (https://gazetteer.dainst.org/app/#!/home) in an effort to unify data.