ToposText

Available

• https://topostext.org
• https://topostext.org/search-tool
• https://topostext.org/TT-downloads

Author

• Brady Kiesling

Description

From the project author (2025-11-25):

ToposText is a website and free mobile application [iOS and Android] launched in December 2016, with sponsorship from the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, allowing easy primary-source research on people and places in the Greco-Roman world, drawing on a uniquely large (860 works, close to 20 million words) collection of ancient texts in English translation. These texts are indexed against a database of more than 8000 mapped places and 21,000 other proper names relevant to the history and mythology of the Greco-Roman world. Each place page has an OpenStreetMap mapping, a brief description (borrowed from a variety of sources or composed by the author), and a table of the literary mentions of the place, key-word-in-context, linking to the full text.

The library includes (in 2025) 860 translated Greek and Latin texts in clean digital form, almost all important surviving works of history, mythology, and geography from Homer through the Early Byzantine period, mostly out-of-copyright translations but some open source or CC translations online for the first time, with links to the original Greek or Latin text. Texts are associated with metadata, including Canonical Text Services (CTS) IDs, Wikidata, LOC, and Trismegistos. Translations have been modified in many cases to make key ancient terms (e.g. divine epithets) easier to find. Each paragraph is associated with an event date, accurate to the year for some historical texts, very approximate for others.

The app includes 8137 mapped historic places and archaeological sites from Spain to India, attested by 277,000 ancient references. The level of mapping detail is highest in Greece, where ancient towers, acropoleis, and other sites with no literary footprint are included, with coordinates verified via Google Earth or autopsy. Coordinates are more likely to be dependent on Pleiades and the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire for outlying regions. ToposText documents and geolocates 250 monuments in Athens, a similar number in Rome. A high percentage of sites are linked to Wikidata as well as Pleiades. Many sites have links to Chronique de Fouilles/Archaeology in Greece.

ToposText also indexes 21,360 proper names – people, gods, festivals, animals – attested by 430,500 key-word-in-context ancient references. Some 13,800 of these entities, 65%, are matched to a Wikidata item and 7500 to an English Wikipedia article.

The large place and person index tables can be by author/work, text type, or mention type, and are sortable by work date or the approximate date of the event in which the place is mentioned.

A proximity search tool on the ToposText.org site allows one to search for any two words or strings (case-insensitive) within 200 characters of each other, using regular expressions. Thus \bHannib AND \belephant will find 34 instances from Plutarch to Eutropius.

Most material on the site is open access, though some works are used in ToposText by permission of the translator. The gazetteer is downloadable as a .kml file, geojson, or in Pelagios LOD or World Historical Gazetteer json-ld format. The text library exists as rdf turtles. Pages and paragraphs are directly addressable via a REST API.

Site development was carried out by Pavla SA, an Athens-based technology company from 2015 to the present. Sponsorship and web hosting is through the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation based in Piraeus, Greece.

References

• ToposText and Wikidata, Sunoikisis Digital Classics session, Summer 2022.
• Review: Mapping Ancient Literature through ToposText Reviewed by Janet D. Jones in Society for Classical Studies Digital Reviews (2019).