20.04.2023 EGYLandscape Project's webGIS is now online!

We are excited to announce that after several years of hard work, the EGYLandscape Project's webGIS is now online and available for use. The EGYLandscape Project is a joint ANR-DFG Project co-hosted by Aix-Marseille University and Marburg University, under the direction of Prof. Dr. Albrecht Fuess.

This core outcome of the EGYLandscape Project is a historical webGIS, that allows scholars to explore rural Egypt in pre-modern times. This webGIS combines textual sources, from the late medieval (13th to 15th centuries) and modern (19th to mid-20th century) periods, with cartographic resources available for the last two centuries to georeference the gathered textual information on a map. The medieval textual sources provide for an exhaustive listing of the basic administrative units and specify their administrative status in their time, thus offering a historical gazetteer of Egypt. Still, these entities considerably evolved over time, with frequent appearance of new places or administrative units, disappearance of existing ones, or change in name or status. The webGIS allows researchers to dive into the geography of rural Egypt over seven centuries, by merging in a single place all the information across the consulted historical sources and, therefore, time-periods.

 

 We hope that this will become an indispensable resource for historians, archaeologists, and students. Even if research is not specifically related to rural or environmental studies, the webGIS is a great way to see where a location in Egypt was historical. In this sense, think of it as a historical Google Map. Otherwise, the applicabilities for research are manyfold. We encourage interested scholars and students to take the time to get familiar with the resource, which has helpful information in the “About" section about the four maps utilized, the textual sources used, and other key concepts. The current version online is a beta version, and the revised final version will be available this September at the official end of the project.

 In addition, the EGYLandscape Project is happy to announce that the project's overview film, which was shot during its final conference last year, is now online. The film can be viewed on the main page of our website: www.egylandscape.org, which has now been updated.