The Mesopotamian Ancient Place-names Almanac (MAPA): A Gazetteer of the Uruk Urbanscape in the Age of Empires

The “Mesopotamian Ancient Place-names Almanac” (MAPA) focuses on the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk and its extensive hinterland (Biblical Erech, modern Warka), one of the world's first mega-cities. Uruk possesses some of the earliest attestations of the cuneiform writing system, and it boasts of being the royal seat of the legendary king Gilgamesh. MAPA is a first step in integrating textual sources with remote sensing data for reconstructing the social and physical geography of Mesopotamia in the Age of Empires. The dataset presented here is the recent edition of the gazetteer (v. 1.0), follows linked open data (LOD) protocols, and draws close to 400 place-names from legal, economic, and administrative texts the rich first millennium BCE archives of Uruk; namely, those produced under the Assyrian, Babylonian and Achaemenid empires.