Camels in the early 20th Century Arabian Gulf

How to explore this map: Click on each dot on the map and you will see a breakdown of the data about camels found in John Gordon Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia in the pop-up box. This map has one layer with labels for all 642 points, although all the labels are not visible (for reasons of occlusion and clutter) at all zoom levels.

Context: This map’s dataset is based on data extracted from the two entries of the Geographical and Statistical section of Lorimer’s Gazetteer. The points on the map of the Gulf Region and their size represent the location and the number of camels at each location. NB: If there are locations without camels, this means only that our source did not document them.

Geolocation: We located the places we have in our dataset using the geographical coordinates found in GeoNames after comparing them to the text to make sure they match Lorimer’s geographic description. We used the geographical coordinates provided by Google Maps when a place is not found in GeoNames.

Notes on data decisions: Non-geographic data of camels quantity were removed from the dataset. (e.g., “they now render tribute at the rate of $1 on every 5 camels”). Camels owned by nomadic tribes were not possible to link to a single location, thus were excluded from the map, but were included in the dataset.

ZFurther mapping: This map is a prototype of a future large, historical environmental atlas of the 20th century Arabian Gulf Region. The atlas will focus on visualizing data about topics including, but not limited to, the region’s livestock, crops, temperature ranges, rainfall amounts, and plants, all documented in Lorimer’s Gazetteer.

Unidentified locations: In building this dataset, we were unable to find 52 places, nearly all of them are in Iran. Unidentifiable places are included in the dataset and are labeled as such in column F (“Disambiguation…”).

Creator of this dataset: Balaqis Al-Senani

Link to this dataset

License: Creative Commons 4.0 BY-NC-SA International

Suggested Citation: OpenGulf Project (2020). Camels in the Early Twentieth-Century Arabian Gulf. https://opengulf.github.io/camels. Accessed xxxx.yy.zz. 10.5281/zenodo.3955081

Last update: 1 September 2021