Mapping Ottoman Iraq Through The 19th & 20th Century Ottoman and British Sources
About the Sources:
This map draws on two historical sources: Seyahatname-i Hudud and Lorimer’s Gazetteer. The Seyahatname was written by Mehmed Hurşid Pasha, a scribe in the Ottoman survey commission of 1848-1852. The commission aimed to resolve border disputes between the Ottoman and Qajar Empires. Most of the book’s information is based on Mehmed Hurşid’s observations and field notes during his trips along the Ottoman-Qajar border, which he published later under the title Seyahatname-i Hudud in 1861. The Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman, and Central Arabia, also known as Lorimer’s Gazetteer, is a multi-volume encyclopedia compiled by John Gordon Lorimer. Originally published in 1908 by the British government in India, it served as a handbook for British diplomats and officials in the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Persia. Place names extracted from the Seyahatname are showed with red and from Lorimer with blue dots. The map depicts all the locations mentioned in the Baghdad and Basra chapters of the Seyahatname-i Hudud and the “Iraq” entry of the Gazetteer’s geographical dictionary.
How to explore this map:
Click on the points to discover all the locations mentioned in the Baghdad and Basra chapters of the Seyahatname and Iraq section of Lorimer. Place names extracted from Seyhatname are shown in dark blue and the Lorimer with orange dots.
Geolocation:
The Baghdad and Basra chapters of the Seyahatname and Iraq section of Lorimer were annotated in Recogito. We collected the bulk of geographical coordinates from Geonames. For the locations for which we could not locate a GeoNames ID, we benefited from sources like Wikipedia, Wikimapia, Vymaps, and Atlas Islamica.
Preliminary Conclusions:
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The Seyahatname provides a spatial visualization that intimately connects Iraq’s geography with Western Iran, the Gulf, and the Arabian Peninsula.
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Ottoman and British spatial imaginations of Southern Iraq, Western Iran, the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula exhibits compatibility.
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This map challenges the commonly accepted notion that the Ottoman Empire possessed minimal knowledge of Southern Iraq, Western Iran, and the Gulf during the 19th century.
Creator of this dataset: Mustafa Emre Gunaydi
Link to this dataset
License: Creative Commons 4.0 BY-NC-SA International
Suggested Citation: Gunaydi, Mustafa Emre. (2024). Mapping Ottoman Iraq Through the 19th & 20th Century Ottoman and British Sources. Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.10674707.svg
Last update: 17 February 2024