Explore the Ancient Greek World Through a Revolutionary Digital Map

A representation of ancient Greece. Public Domain

A integer representation of past Greece and the known past satellite arsenic traveled by past geographers has been created by researchers astatine the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

The representation lets users get to cognize not lone the cities and their stories, but besides the topography of each region, precisely arsenic it was successful antiquity.

The integer and freely accessible humanities geography exertion PERIPLUS, which has been operating since May 2024 successful the cyberspace of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), has precisely this purpose: To represent the astir implicit integer representation to day of the full known past world, from Ireland to India, and with a clip scope from humanities times to precocious antiquity.

With PERIPLUS, users can:

• Explore past cities, rivers, mountains, and regions utilizing their archetypal names.
• View humanities details, sanction variations, and linked resources.
• Search and item past locations successful immoderate text, successful immoderate language.
• Access translated past texts linked straight to the map.

Unlike akin tools, PERIPLUS provides afloat discourse by showing adjacent landmarks, includes polytonic Greek names, and allows toggling betwixt ancient, Latinized, and modern names.

Digital representation to digitize the full corpus of past Greek literature

A cardinal and ambitious extremity of the PERIPLUS task is to digitize the full corpus of past Greek literature, providing free, open-access translations successful some English and modern Greek. This includes astir 1,200 texts successful total. The archetypal to beryllium completed is the Periplus of the Red Sea, a little-known 1st-century AD geographical work, translated into modern Greek by Professor Dimitrios Plantzos.

“It’s a challenging text,” explains Professor Kopanias, the project’s coordinator. “Though not wide read—even among specialists—it’s packed with references to places, which are hard to travel without a map. But erstwhile you do, it reveals an bonzer wealthiness of geographical and humanities information. That’s wherefore we began with texts similar this: they whitethorn look adust astatine archetypal glance, but with the assistance of integer tools, they travel to life.”

Upcoming texts see works by Strabo, Herodotus, Homer, and more—bringing past lit and geography unneurotic similar ne'er before.

The level includes 3 cardinal components:

• Periplus Atlas – A elaborate interactive representation of the past world.
• Periplus Logos – Ancient texts with hyperlinked geographic references.
• Periplus App – A instrumentality for automatically tagging geographic presumption successful texts, allowing users to make and people their ain web maps.

The task is wholly free, collaborative, and volunteer-driven, involving implicit 140 students. It aims to service scholars, students, educators, and anyone fascinated by antiquity.

As Professor Kopanias, puts it: “Our extremity is to connection a powerful, accessible instrumentality that connects radical to the past world—through maps, texts, and monuments—making adjacent the lesser-known sites travel alive.”

Ready to explore? Visit: https://periplus.arch.uoa.gr