Mapping al-Shawwam تخريط الشوام

Mapping al-Shawwam

تخريط الشوام

A digital platform for exploring the historical geography of Bilad al-Sham through interactive mapping and archival documents.

2,400+ Locations
350+ Sources
10+ Centuries Coverage
Geographic Scope
Major Cities
Villages & Towns
Routes & Paths
Jurisdictional Boundaries

Platform Capabilities

Lives and landscapes of Bilād al-Shām: historical cartography from registers, gazetteers, and oral testimonies.

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Interactive Mapping

Leaflet/MapLibre 2D (3D in beta) with bilingual labels. Toggle Sources and Surnames lenses; layer Ottoman districts/sub-districts, routes, and settlements; export a snapshot or short clip of any view.

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Documentary Evidence

Access original source materials and transcriptions. Every location is grounded in historical documentation with full citations.

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Temporal Analysis

Trace how places, names, and boundaries evolved across centuries. Visualize change through interactive timelines.

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Advanced Search

Query by place names (Arabic and transliterated), dates, source types, and relationships. Filter and cross-reference with precision.

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Surnames Journeys

Reconstruct and compare documented routes, migrations, and itineraries for one or many surnames. Show alternate paths with their textual witnesses and an uncertainty badge on disputed segments.

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Open Data Pipeline

Transparent ETL: scans → preprocessing (deskew/binarize) → OCR (Tesseract/Kraken) → normalized JSON → Supabase/PostGIS → map. Download GeoJSON/CSV; method notes and transformation logs versioned for reproducibility.