About

Methodology

Onomastikon is a digital reference work created by Shriram Rajagopal that catalogs the endonyms and exonyms of ancient entities, including civilizations, cities, regions, and geographic features. This includes what they called themselves and what their neighbors called them. Each entry records the original script, transliteration, reconstructed pronunciation, literal meaning, and primary sources, with attention to uncertainty.

Editorial scope

The project covers entities of the ancient world, including civilizations, cities, regions, and geographic features. The temporal scope runs roughly from the Bronze Age through Late Aniquity. Each entry focuses on its subject as a primarily linguistic but also historical record. Readers seeking detailed historical context should consult the standard reference works cited in each entry.

Regions and identification across languages

Regional names attested in different languages do not always pick out identical geographic units. Greek Mesopotamía, Akkadian Māt birīt nārim, and Hebrew Aram-Naharaim all refer transparently to the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and are treated as variant names of the same entity. By contrast, Sanskrit Bhārata and Old Persian Hinduš, though both connected to what is now called India, designate different conceptual units (a civilizational-cultural identity versus a specific river basin) and are treated as distinct entities. Where two names overlap partially or are framed differently, the entry's prose explains the distinction.

Entry status

Source tiers

Entries draw on sources in roughly the following order of priority, with higher tiers preferred wherever they offer adequate coverage.

1. Standard reference works in the relevant philological tradition: the Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th ed.), the Cambridge Ancient History, the Reallexikon der Assyriologie, the Lexikon der Ägyptologie, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica.
2. Specialist lexica and grammars: the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD), Liddell–Scott–Jones, Beekes' Etymological Dictionary of Greek, the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), and comparable works for each language tradition.
3. Primary text corpora: the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, the Perseus Digital Library, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, and ORACC.
4. Peer-reviewed monographs and journal articles for contested cases or recent reassessments.

Wikipedia and other tertiary aggregators are used as starting points for navigation but never as citations.

Reconstruction and uncertainty

Reconstructed pronunciations follow the standard linguistic convention of a leading asterisk (e.g., *kuːmat). Where multiple reconstructions are current, the entry follows the source cited and notes the alternative(s). All dates are approximate, as denoted by "c." (circa). Date ranges represent attested periods of time in which names were used. For instance, Latin existed for roughly a millennium before Aegyptus appears in Latin sources as a name for Egypt. So the entry dates reflect the narrower window of the name's use rather than the full lifespan of the language to which it belongs. Where a name's first attestation is securely dated to a specific inscription or text, the entry notes this and specifies the date of the source.

Every name entry carries one of three confidence labels:

Attested

The form is documented in primary sources, even where its pronunciation must be reconstructed (as is typical for Egyptian and cuneiform corpora).

Reconstructed

The form itself, not merely its pronunciation, is inferred, typically through comparative reconstruction or projection from a later attested form.

Disputed

Scholars disagree substantively about the form, its meaning, or its identification with the entity in question.

Transliteration conventions

Each language follows the transliteration standard of its established philological tradition: the Leiden Unified Transliteration for Ancient Egyptian; the Chicago system for Akkadian (CAD); the Library of Congress ALA-LC romanization for Sanskrit; standard scholarly conventions for Greek, Latin, Old Persian, and Biblical Hebrew. Where multiple systems coexist, the entry notes the choice.

Limitations

Onomastikon is the work of a student in active study, not a credentialed philologist. Entries are checked against the cited sources and corrected when error is identified. Errors and disputed identifications should be reported via the project's GitHub repository, where each entry's source Markdown file can be viewed, cited, and improved by pull request.

Source

The full source of the project, including the underlying data for every entry, is available at github.com/shriram-rajagopal/onomastikon. Code is released under the MIT license; content under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.