Exposing 18th-20th geo-historical knowledge of the Horn of Africa into the Web of Data

By Eloi Fiquet

Northeastern Africa is characterized by an especially rich and ancient political and cultural history, ethnic diversity and a very rich corpus of historical and cultural source material, including centuries old local historiographies in Christian Ethiopia and neighboring Muslim polities. These sources include cartographic documents, produced by foreign researchers and co-produced by anonymous local informants, such as traditional scholars, merchants and office holders.

After the whole shape of the African continent had been comprehended by navigators and thereafter represented on maps in the 16th century, northeastern Africa was the best-cartographed region in Africa — by contrast to other regions that were represented either according to classical Ptolemaic traditions or by “white areas”. This density of geographic knowledge was especially true for the Christian regions of Ethiopia, also named Abyssinia, which, at an early stage, had entered into the known world of the Western geographers.

A steady flow of information reached European scholars since the first Portuguese expedition in Ethiopia in the beginning of the 16th century. The settlement of Jesuit missionaries brought the first geodesic measures and accurate geographic observations. After the Jesuits were expelled in 1634, the country was closed to European visitors until the end of the 18th century. In 1683, the German scholar Hiob Ludolf (1624–1704), published a large map of Abyssinia revising the maps published by the Jesuits on the basis of information he collected from an Ethiopian monk, Abba Gorgoryos, a Catholic convert, whom he met and worked with in Rome in the 1650s (Fig.1). After a period of isolation of the Ethiopian kingdom, the Scottish traveler James Bruce published in 1790 the first maps of Ethiopia and the Nile basin based on the direct observations and measurements he had made twenty years earlier.

In the 19th century, an exponentially growing amount of toponymic and topographic data was collected by travelers (Fig.2), missionaries and researchers, some of whom lived in the region for many years and collected their information from locals, often in the context of long stays at local kings’ courts, and in some cases due to their involvement in local kinship and power networks after their marriages into local families. The accessibility of information by local traders, traditional scholars and regional rulers assured that a great wealth of historically and anthropologically important data was amassed over time.

Fig. 1: Focus on a map printed in Amsterdam in 1709, first printed in Frankfurt in 1683 by the German scholar Hiob Ludolf, on the basis of his collaboration in the 1650s with the Ethiopian scholar Abba Gorgoryos, who was hosted in the Vatican. It is a revised and expanded version of a previous map published in 1660 summarizing the works of the Portuguese Jesuit mission in Ethiopia until the 1630s (ethiomap.huma-num.fr/public/?id_article=22).

Despite better accessibility to scattered collection of old maps through digital repositories, the reading and analysis their information requires advanced tools and methods. This is the objective of the EthioMap project funded through a joined action of two research agencies, the ANR in France and the DFG in Germany. The three associated teams in Paris (EHESS, CéSor), Gotha (Gotha Research Center of Erfurt University) and Mekelle University (Mekelle, Tigray, Ethiopia) have gathered, digitised and described a coherent corpus of 50 historical cartographic maps concerning the area of Northeastern Africa and issued from distinct producers, from the 17th century to the first half of the 20th century. See our corpus of digitised maps here: https://ethiomap.huma-num.fr/spip.php?rubrique2

Fig. 2: Focus on the “Map illustrating Dr Beke’s journey through Abyssinia (1840–1843)” published in London in 1844. The same area as fig. 1 is shown here, with information based on field observation. The traveler’s itinerary is highlighted in red lines.

In recent years, EthioMap has accumulated more than 12,000 historical place attestations. Ethiopian studies scholars based in Ethiopia, France and Germany have annotated and verified old toponyms in these maps, with alternate transcriptions, in Ethiopian script or other Latin scripts (Fig.3 & 4). The purpose of the Pelagios resource development grant obtained from Pelagios Commons is to expose these attestations into the Web of Data.

Fig. 3: The same map as fig.1, with tags showing of the places identified by the mapmaker as Jesuit residences.

Fig. 4: The Ethiomap interface, with the list of Jesuit residences found on the map (before their dismantling in the 1630s).

In this context, EthioMap is collaborating with Beta maṣāḥǝft (BM) project based at Hamburg University. This expression, written ቤተ መጻሕፍት in the Ge’ez classical Ethiopian language, means ‘house of books’, or ‘library’. It is aimed at studying the predominantly Christian manuscript tradition of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Highlands through a virtual research environment providing access to texts, through complex sets of metadata to describe collections of manuscripts, and data extracted from edited texts, including places.

Fig. 5: Capture from the BM image viewer interface, displaying a magic scroll from the Laurenziana collection in Florence, Italy. Link

Both teams will be working together for aligning EthioMap place attestations to URIs relying on the BM semantic historical gazetteer of Ethiopian and Eritrean territories already accessible via the Pelagios API and in Peripleo. For entries without a suitable match in this gazetteer, EthioMap will contribute such new place records containing toponyms in several languages as well as provenance information (map source and dates) so to enlarge the geo-historical coverage of the BM gazetteer. This linkage between the two databases will allow a crossed questioning between textual and cartographic sources.

Finally, a subset of EthioMap place attestations have not been entirely verified by scholars and for which we would like to create further place entries. The task is quite challenging at the documentary level, we will thus select a particular Ethiopian territory and a part of the EthioMap corpus and work with the historians of the team.

Team members

Eloi Ficquet, Césor-EHESS-Paris, CFEE-Addis Ababa.

Wolbert Smidt, Gotha Research Center, Erfurt University

Simon Imbert-Vier, software developer and historian, IMAF-Aix.

Carmen Brando, CRH (UMR 8558) / EHESS Geomatics platform.

Stéphane Ancel, Césor-EHESS.

Thomas Osmond, independent anthropologist, associate researcher of the French Center for Ethiopian Studies (CFEE, Addis Ababa).

The EthioMap project is co-headed by Eloi Ficquet, anthropologist and historian at the Center for the Social Sciences of Religions (CéSor) at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), and by Wolbert G.C. Smidt, ethno-historian and member of the Research Centre Gotha of Erfurt University, Germany, affiliated to the doctoral programme “History and Cultural Studies”, Mekelle University, Ethiopia.