A number of historical and recent cartographic sources, ranging from the 1800s until today, were used to build the EGYLandscape toponyms database. Some of them are presented in the webGIS application, so that they can be compared and/or combined to provide for an insight on the evolution of the Egyptian landscapes over the last two centuries.

The Atlas de la Description de l’Égypte maps were engraved in Paris from topographic surveys carried out by the engineers-geographers of the French Expedition to Egypt between 1798 and 1801. As they followed the army’s campaign, these engineers sometimes had little time to make their measurements. As a result, their survey quality is often poorer in areas where resistance to the French occupation was most intense, so that precisely georeferencing the resulting maps can be challenging and errors or omissions in the representation of toponyms are frequent. Nevertheless, as a first attempt to build a complete and detailed cartography of the Egyptian oikumene, its historical value is exceptional. A composite of all maps from this Atlas can be found in the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection website.

The Survey of Egypt 1:50,000 topographic maps are the first complete and geographically accurate coverage of the Egyptian oikumene. The Survey Department, created in 1898, conducted on site data collection and measurements from 1898 to 1907, and the resulting maps were published between 1906 and 1911. A second edition with some revisions and minor changes was released in 1913. This impressive, high-quality collection of 216 map sheets was the main cartographic source used for locating and georeferencing the entries of the historical gazetteer produced for the EGYLandscape webGIS. Composited maps and indexes, as well as their common legend are available on the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection website.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a project founded by Steve Coast in 2004 to collaboratively build a free editable geographic database of the world. Its creation and growth have been motivated by the predominance of proprietary map data, thus leading to restrictions on the use and availability of geographic information across much of the world. Relying on the advent of inexpensive portable satellite devices (such as GPS), millions of registered users now participate in collecting data and sharing their local knowledge of areas all over the planet to build a crowdsourced and community-owned map of the world, available to all under an Open Database License. The OSM basemap is available in the EGYLandscape webGIS to provide for a current map of Egypt.

Satellite Imagery, managed by Esri and also available in the EGYLandscape webGIS, covers most of the world within 3 to 5 years currentness and allows for an aerial photographic view of present-day Egypt. This data layer combines Earthstar Geographics imagery at small and mid-scales (down to 1:300 000), Maxar imagery at about 1.2 to 0.6 meter resolution, as well as high-resolution aerial imagery contributed by the GIS User Community.



Other historical cartographic sources have also been occasionally used to georeferenced data for this webGIS, including The Survey of Egypt topographic maps at 1:25,000, published between 1928 and 1943, and at a scale of 1:100,000, which are most likely compilations of reduced 1:50,000 sheets and were published around 1916.

The webGIS relies upon six main sources of information, either textual or cartographic, offering an exhaustive inventory of the basic administrative units and of the administrative divisions of Egypt across the centuries. They included four medieval textual sources, namely Ibn Mammātī, al-Nābulusī, Ibn Duqmāq, and Ibn al-Ǧīʿān, and two contemporary sources, which are the collection of Survey of Egypt 1:50,000 maps and Muḥammad Ramzī’s geographical dictionary. Other resources were also used on an ad hoc basis to complement the information present in the main sources, all presented below. The initials or names in brackets before each of the following entries refers to the source abbreviation as used across the webGIS.

[IM - ا م] Al-Asʿad b. Muhaḏḏab Ibn Mammātī (544-606 AH / [1149-1150]-1209) was a senior official in the early Ayyubid period. He headed the dīwān al-ǧayš (War Office) during the reigns of Saladin (1169-1193) and al-ʿAzīz (1193-1198), but fell into disgrace during the latter’s reign and was forced to flee to Aleppo. He composed the Kitāb Qawānīn al-dawāwīn, a compendium of knowledge useful to civil officials, dedicated to al-ʿAzīz. This book includes a list of the administrative units of Egypt, arranged by the first letter of the toponym and then by province. This list is most likely originated from the most recent survey then available: the rawk ṣalāḥī carried out under Saladin in 1176-1181.

In the webGIS, mentions of Ibn Mammātī [IM - ا م] always refer to the A.S. Atiya edition, Cairo, 1943 of the Kitāb Qawānīn al-dawāwīn.

[NB - ن ب] ʿAlā' al-Dīn ʿUṯmān b. Ibrāhīm al-Qurašī Ibn al-Nābulusī (588-660 AH / 1192-1262), who came from a family of ulama, was a senior official in the Ayyubid administration, and authored several treaties dealing with administrative or legal matters. His Tārīḫ al-Fayyūm provides the results of an inspection he carried out in this province for Sultan al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ during the spring of 642 AH / 1245. After a thorough overview of the area, the book details the administrative units arranged in alphabetical order and accompanied by very detailed information, which includes the mention of many secondary toponyms. It was first published in Cairo in 1898, then by Yossef Rapoport and Ido Shahar in 2018.

In the webGIS, mentions of Ibn al-Nābulusī [NB - ن ب] always refer to the 1898 edition of the Tārīḫ al-Fayyūm.

[ID - ا د] Ṣārim al-Dīn Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad Ibn Duqmāq (750-809 AH / 1349-1406), grandson of a Mamluk, wrote several historical and biographical books, as well as a geographical work, the Kitāb al-Intiṣār li-wāsiṭat ʿiqd al-amṣār. While only the fourth and fifth volumes of the latter still exist, they contain descriptions of Fusṭāṭ and Alexandria and a list of the basic administrative units of Egypt, arranged by province and then alphabetically. The name of each unit is followed by its fiscal area (misāḥa), its fiscal potential (ʿibra), and the beneficiaries of its fiscal revenues. The list of toponyms and the cadastral areas presumably refer to the then most recent land survey, the rawk nāṣirī (1315), while the beneficiaries’ names relate to recent changes which occurred during the reign of Barqūq, specifically in 797-798 AH / 1394-1395.

In the surviving manuscripts, several pages of this land survey are missing, and much of the information that should have accompanied the place names are left blank. These blanks have been respected by the 1893 Cairo edition of Carl Vollers, to which the webGIS refers when mentioning Ibn Duqmāq [ID - ا د].

[IG - ا ج] Šaraf al-Dīn Yaḥyā Ibn al-Ǧīʿān (814-885 AH / [1411-1412]-1480) was a senior official in the Mamluk administration and the author of al-Tuḥfa al-saniyya bi-asmā' al-bilād al-miṣriyya. This book consists of a list of the basic administrative units of Egypt arranged, as in Ibn Duqmāq, by province and then alphabetical order. Like Ibn Duqmāq, for each unit is given its fiscal area (misāḥa), its fiscal potential (ʿibra), and the name of the beneficiaries of its fiscal revenues for two periods: in 777/1376 and then during the author’s own lifetime, more precisely between 880/1475 and 883/1478. This is also the date of the earliest preserved manuscript of his work (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Huntington 2).

In the webGIS, mentions to Ibn al-Ǧīʿān [IG - ا ج] refer to the Bernard Moritz edition, 1898, of the Tuḥfa. Still, the readings of B. Moritz have often been compared to those of the ms. Bodleian.

[S50 - خ ٥٠] The Survey of Egypt 1:50,000 topographic maps (circa 1913) are the first complete and geographically accurate coverage of the Egyptian oikumene, conducted by the Survey Department from 1898 to 1907. The resulting maps were published between 1906 and 1911, and a second edition with some revisions and minor changes was released in 1913. This impressive high-quality collection of 216 map sheets was the main cartographic source used for locating and georeferencing the entries of the historical gazetteer produced for the EGYLandscape webGIS, and the detailed information it contains was also critical for data collection on toponyms and administrative situation.

[Ramzī - رمزي] Muḥammad Ramzī (1871-1945), a civil servant in the Interior and Finance departments during most of his life, is the author of al-Qāmūs al-ǧuġrāfī li-l-bilād al-miṣriyya min ʿahd qudamā’ al-Miṣriyyīn ilā sanat 1945, Cairo, 6 vols, 1953-1968. The second part of his work, divided into four geographical volumes, is an exhaustive dictionary of the basic administrative units of Egypt in Ramzī's time, classified by province and district. Furthermore, each district is divided into ancient and modern bilād, i.e. those mentioned in medieval and post-sixteenth-century sources. Ramzī consulted a large number of medieval and modern sources to reconstruct the administrative history of each unit, noting in particular possible changes in names and status, up until his time.
The first part of the book is devoted to ‘disappeared villages’, which are those mentioned by the medieval sources but whose agglomeration and name no longer existed. Ramzī took advantage of his position in the civil service to try to discover the location of these ‘disappeared villages’, either on cadastral maps or by asking villagers directly.
While many documents used by Ramzī are no longer available today, notably an impressive set of administrative documents from the governorship of Muḥammad ʿAlī (1805-1848) onwards, his work is a valuable secondary source to explore these, and the on-site investigations he conducted also allowed him to gather precious information on historical Egyptian toponymy.

In the webGIS, mentions to [Ramzī - رمزي] refer to the post-mortem publication of his work, prepared by Aḥmad Rāmī and Aḥmad Luṭfī al-Sayyid.

Other resources have also been occasionally used to complement the information extracted from the six primary sources detailed above. They include:

• The work of Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds (1798-1883), an engineer in the service of Muḥammad ʿAlī and his successors, who published several maps of Egypt, such as the Hydrographic Chart of Middle Egypt and of the Southern Part of Upper Egypt (1854, completed 1882) and the Hydrographic Chart of Lower Egypt and Part of the Isthmus of Suez (1854, 1855, completed 1882);
• Amédée Boinet’s Dictionnaire géographique de l'Égypte (Cairo, 1899), which is an alphabetical compilation of the 18,141 principal and secondary localities of Egypt according to the 1897 census. It details the name of each place both in Arabic and Latin characters, the number of inhabitants, as well as the status and the position in the administrative division;
• Heinz Halm’s Ägypten nach den mamlukischen Lehensregistern (Wiesbaden, 2 vols, 1979-1980), which is a gazetteer of late medieval Egypt based on Ibn Mammātī, Ibn Duqmāq, Ibn al-Ǧīʿān and other medieval sources, supplemented by an atlas;
  
• The Central Agency for the Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) and the Centre d'études et de documentation économiques, juridiques et sociales (Cedej) online portal, which provides a cartographic visualization of the results of 14 Egyptian population censuses from 1882 to 2017, available at https://www.cedejcapmas.org/.

The mapping of rural Egypt requires distinguishing between settlements as physical realities and as administrative units. While the maps we used for geolocating toponyms in the webGIS describe different types of settlements (i.e., towns, villages, hamlets or isolated inhabited places), the medieval textual sources were only interested in administrative units (with the exception of al-Nābulusī, who for each unit also describes the physical reality of the settlements it contained). Thus, the EGYLandscape webGIS assumes that a medieval administrative unit corresponds to the village of the same name and area visible on more recent maps, unless positive information indicates that the village has moved. The naming transformations of an administrative unit over the ages, as documented by Ramzī, allows linking the successive names of an administrative unit to its corresponding contemporary villages.

The webGIS attaches a set of standardized information to each place or toponym presented on the map, including a unique identification code, the names relating to each place (including variants), its administrative status, and a kind which briefly describes its physical reality, as detailed below. Beside the identification code, each of these pieces of information is linked to the source (either textual or cartographic) from which it was extracted, thus allowing the user to follow the evolution of the place over time.

• Each toponym is identified by a unique and invariable place identifier. We chose to use the six-digit codes created by CAPMAS for all administrative units in Egypt in the 1996 and 2006 censuses. Derived codes were created for places not included in the CAPMAS lists.
• In a given source, every place has one or more names. The webGIS distinguishes between the name given first by the source, the alternative name(s) which may also be reported, and simple spelling variants, by storing each of them in separate fields. We conducted standardization and harmonization of names, both for their Arabic names (provided by all sources) and their transliteration:
  In Arabic, we decided to always write the tā’ marbūṭa as [ـة] and the final ī/y as [ـي], the initial hamza is never written, nor is the hamza carried by an alif within a word, but the hamza carried by a wāw or a yā’ within a word is kept.
  The transliteration of toponyms into Latin characters follows the IFAO standards. We used the classical forms of common Arabic terms found in double toponyms (such as Dayr, Kawm, Minša’a, etc. or Awlād and Banī). However, the dialectal pronunciation variants of these terms was left to the discretion of the editors of the records for the webGIS database entry. In all cases, only three short and three long vowels were kept: a, i, u, and ā, ī, ū. For the medieval sources, which do not record short vowels (except for the ms. Bodleian, Huntington 2 of Ibn al-Ǧīʿān), the reading proposed by Heinz Halm, based on modern sources, was most often adopted, and we sometimes offered our own reading.
  While the Survey’s maps transcribe a vernacular pronunciation in Latin characters, which is valuable in this respect, we have most often rendered e as i, o as u, ô as ū, and ei as ay. The maps’ vocalization of toponyms of obviously Arabic origin were sometimes standardized to their classical form, but sometimes maintained as were in order to reflect the pronunciations in use a century ago.
  We followed, as much as possible, the information given by Muḥammad Ramzī, who most often provides the short vowels in Arabic. Note that he has often indicated by a special sign, ^, the vernacular pronunciation of the diphthong ay, which we have transcribed ay. Where Ramzī does not provide the short vowels, we relied on Boinet and the Survey map, which give the place names in both Arabic (vocalized by Boinet, not by the Survey maps) and Latin characters. The frequent discrepancies between Boinet, the Survey maps, and Ramzī are due to lapses in the vernacular pronunciation or in its understanding by officials used to the Cairo language.
• By the end of the Middle Ages, all settlements in rural Egypt were part of administrative units, thus bearing an administrative status. The vocabulary designating these units varies according to the sources: nāḥiya, qarya, balda are the most frequent terms. We have chosen the term Nāhiya [ناحية] as a generic name for the basic administrative unit (called “Local Unit” in the webGIS). These are the record entries in al-Nābulusī, Ibn Duqmāq and Ibn al-Ǧīʿān.
  As a general rule, a nāḥiya corresponds to the village that bears its name. Still, some nāḥiya may bear a double or even triple name, corresponding to two or three settlements, either surviving or extinct, at the time at which the registry was compiled by a given source. Some units also included dependent settlements, for which we are less well informed. The webGIS database designates their status as a "dependency" [تابع]. In these cases, the name of the locality differs from that of the Local Unit to which it was attached. Likewise, there are nāḥiya without villages, whose inhabitants are agglomerated in the village of another neighbouring Local Unit.
  In contemporary times, secondary dependencies or agglomerations are present, below the village level and bearing the same name as the nāḥiya in which they are located, notably the naǧʿ that result from the sedentarization of the Bedouin or the ʿizba which is an agricultural estate. We have noted these dependencies when, at one time or another, they had the status of an administrative unit.
  Every nāḥiya was part of a province, a higher level administrative division of Egypt. Its organization evolved over time, with some appearing or disappearing. The terms designating the provinces (ʿamal, iqlīm, wilāya, mudīriyya) also changed over the periods and the consulted sources, but we have retained the generic name of province [إقليم] across the webGIS database. In contemporary times, districts (markaz) were created as an intermediate administrative level. Every rural nāḥiya now belongs to a district and a province.
• On the webGIS, the kind refers to the type of settlement in the corresponding source. For medieval sources we have retained only three categories: madīna for provincial capitals, village for villages named after the basic administrative units, and hamlet for dependent settlements. In the twentieth century (Survey and Ramzī maps), the variety of settlement types flourishes. There are ʿizba (agricultural estate), tall and kawm (hill, frequently archeological), archeological site, monastery, etc.

Citing the platform and its dataset:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY License, which allows users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material of this webGIS in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to its creator.
Please give credit to any image or data used from this platform with the recommended citation:
EGYLandscape webGIS. [Year accessed]. Version [Date Accessed]. Available at: [URL to the platform].

Credits and participation:

Historical data acquisition: G. Alleaume, M. Ghiglia, N. Michel.
Geographic data production: G. Alleaume, F. Dubertret, M. Ghiglia, H. Rakrouki.
Data curation: G. Alleaume, F. Dubertret, M. Ghiglia, N. Michel.
Platform conceptualization and software development (based on open-source libraries): F. Dubertret.
Website/platform administration: V.Bayle, F.Dubertret.
Project administration: N. Michel.

Acknowledgment and Sponsors:

We would like to express our gratitude to Eric Denis and François Moriconi-Ebrard (CEDEJ) for the valuable datasets they shared with us on Egypt’s administrative organization and censuses, which served as a basis for organizing the data collection for this webGIS. Vincent Bayle’s (MMSH) help was also critical in setting-up the server for this platform, as well as taking-on its administration for future maintenance. Last but not least, Aurélien Reys helped in drafting the first ideas which later became this webGIS platform.

Date conversions between the different calendars were done using the tool developed by Johannes Thomann, University of Zürich, available here.

The EGYLandscape project was jointly funded by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche and the German Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The webGIS platform is hosted on the Huma-Num, the French research infrastructure for Literature, Humanities, Social Sciences and Digital Humanities.