Gazetteer

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Ordnance Gazetteer for Scotland - Title Page
Ordnance Gazetteer for Scotland - First Page

A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary[1][2][3] or directory used in conjunction with a map or atlas.[4][5] It typically contains information concerning the geographical makeup, social statistics and physical features of a country, region, or continent. Content of a gazetteer can include a subject's location, dimensions of peaks and waterways, population, gross domestic product and literacy rate. This information is generally divided into topics with entries listed in alphabetical order.

libraries
as well as on the internet.

Etymology

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a "gazetteer" as a "geographical index or dictionary".[6] It includes as an example a work by the British historian Laurence Echard (d. 1730) in 1693 that bore the title "The Gazetteer's: or Newsman's Interpreter: Being a Geographical Index".[6] Echard wrote that the title "Gazetteer's" was suggested to him by a "very eminent person" whose name he chose not to disclose.[6] For Part II of this work published in 1704, Echard referred to the book simply as "the Gazeteer". This marked the introduction of the word "gazetteer" into the English language.[6] Historian Robert C. White suggests that the "very eminent person" written of by Echard was his colleague Edmund Bohun, and chose not to mention Bohun because he became associated with the Jacobite movement.[6]

Since the 18th century, the word "gazetteer" has been used interchangeably to define either its traditional meaning (i.e., a geographical dictionary or directory) or a daily newspaper, such as the London Gazetteer.[7][8]

Types and organization

Gazetteers are often categorized by the type, and scope, of the information presented. World gazetteers usually consist of an alphabetical listing of countries, with pertinent

British National Grid reference). Short-form gazetteers appear as a place–name index in the rear of major published atlases. Descriptive gazetteers may include lengthy textual descriptions of the places they contain, including explanation of industries, government, geography, together with historical perspectives, maps and/or photographs. Thematic gazetteers list places or geographical features by theme; for example fishing ports, nuclear power
stations, or historic buildings. Their common element is that the geographical location is an important attribute of the features listed.

Gazetteer editors gather facts and other information from official government reports, the

chambers of commerce, together with numerous other sources, and organise these in digest
form.

History

Further information: History of geography and History of cartography

Western world

Hellenistic and Greco-Roman eras

Ptolemy world map, reconstituted from Ptolemy's Geographia (c. 150), indicating the countries of "Serica" and "Sinae" (China) at the extreme right, beyond the island of "Taprobane" (Sri Lanka, oversized) and the "Aurea Chersonesus" (Malay Peninsula
).
John Norden's map of London published in 1593
John Speed's map of "Bedforde", from his Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, published in 1611
"Prevailing Religions of the British Indian Empire", from the Imperial Gazetteer of India, Oxford University Press, 1909
American geographer Jedidiah Morse's "A New Map of North America Shewing all the New Discoveries" from his gazetteer of 1797

In his journal article "Alexander and the Ganges" (1923), the 20th-century historian W.W. Tarn calls a list and description of satrapies of Alexander's Empire written between 324 and 323 BC as an ancient gazetteer.[9] Tarn notes that the document is dated no later than June 323 BC, since it features Babylon as not yet partitioned by Alexander's generals.[10] It was revised by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in the 1st century BC.[10] In the 1st century BC, Dionysius of Halicarnassus mentioned the chronicle-type format of the writing of the logographers in the age before the founder of the Greek historiographic tradition, Herodotus (i.e., before the 480s BC), saying "they did not write connected accounts but instead broke them up according to peoples and cities, treating each separately".[11] Historian Truesdell S. Brown asserts that what Dionysius describes in this quote about the logographers should be categorized not as a true "history" but rather as a gazetteer.[11] While discussing the Greek conception of the river delta in ancient Greek literature, Francis Celoria notes that both Ptolemy and Pausanias of the 2nd century AD provided gazetteer information on geographical terms.[12]

Perhaps predating Greek gazetteers were those made in

Twentieth dynasty of Egypt), which provides the following for each administrative area of Egypt at the time:[13]

...the name of a nome capital, its sacred barque, its sacred tree, its cemetery, the date of its festival, the names of forbidden objects, the local god, land, and lake of the city. This interesting codification of data, probably made by a priest, is paralleled by very similar editions of data on the temple walls at Edfu, for example.[13]

Medieval and early modern eras

The

administrative hundreds and referenced to attached maps.[17] Englishman John Speed's Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine published in 1611 provided gazetteers for counties throughout England, which included illustrative maps, short local histories, a list of administrative hundreds, an index of parishes, and the coordinates of longitude and latitude for county towns.[18] Starting in 1662, the Hearth Tax Returns with attached maps of local areas were compiled by individual parishes throughout England while a duplicate of their records were sent to the central government offices of the Exchequer.[16] To supplement his "new large Map of England" from 1677, the English cartographer John Adams compiled the extensive gazetteer "Index Villaris" in 1680 that had some 24,000 places listed with geographical coordinates coinciding with the map.[17] The "Geographical Dictionary" of Edmund Bohun was published in London in 1688, comprising 806 pages with some 8,500 entries.[19] In his work, Edmund Bohun attributed the first known Western geographical dictionary to geographer Stephanus of Byzantium (fl. 6th century) while also noting influence in his work from the Thesaurus Geographicus (1587) by the Belgian cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), but stated that Ortelius' work dealt largely with ancient geography and not up-to-date information.[19] Only fragments of Stephanus' geographical work Ethnica (Εθνικά) have survived and were first examined by the Italian printer Aldus Manutius
in his work of 1502.

The Italian monk

Zürich in 1605.[20] He divided this work into overhead topics of cities, rivers, mountains, and lakes and swamps.[20] All placenames, given in Latin, were arranged in alphabetical order for each overhead division by geographic type;.[20] A year after his death, his "Lexicon Geographicum" was published, which contained more than 9,000 different entries for geographic places.[20] This was an improvement over Ortelius' work, since it included modern placenames and places discovered since the time of Ortelius.[20]

Persians, Greeks, and Romans with their modern equivalent names, and a work published in Paris in 1651 that was both the first universal and vernacular geographical dictionary of Europe.[19] With the gradual expansion of Laurence Echard's (d. 1730) gazetteer of 1693, it too became a universal geographical dictionary that was translated into Spanish in 1750, into French in 1809, and into Italian in 1810.[21]

Following the American Revolutionary War, United States clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap and Postmaster General Ebenezer Hazard intended to create the first post-revolutionary geographical works and gazetteers, but they were anticipated by the clergyman and geographer Jedidiah Morse with his Geography Made Easy in 1784.[22] However, Morse was unable to finish the gazetteer in time for his 1784 geography and postponed it.[23] Yet his delay to publish it lasted too long, as it was Joseph Scott in 1795 who published the first post-revolutionary American gazetteer, his Gazetteer of the United States.[23] With the aid of Noah Webster and Rev. Samuel Austin, Morse finally published his gazetteer The American Universal Geography in 1797.[24] However, Morse's gazetteer did not receive distinction by literary critics, as gazetteers were deemed as belonging to a lower literary class.[25] The reviewer of Joseph Scott's 1795 gazetteer commented that it was "little more than medleys of politics, history and miscellaneous remarks on the manners, languages and arts of different nations, arranged in the order in which the territories stand on the map".[25] Nevertheless, in 1802 Morse followed up his original work by co-publishing A New Gazetteer of the Eastern Continent with Rev. Elijah Parish, the latter of whom Ralph H. Brown asserts did the "lion's share of the work in compiling it".[26]

Modern era

Gazetteers became widely popular in

National Gazetteer (for Scotland), formerly known as the Definitive National Address – Scotland National Gazetteer. In addition to local or regional gazetteers, there have also been comprehensive world gazetteers published; an early example would be the 1912 world gazetteer published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.[27] There are also interregional gazetteers with a specific focus, such as the gazetteer of the Swedish atlas "Das Bästas Bilbok" (1969), a road atlas and guide for Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark.[28]

East Asia

China

"Jinling Tuyong" ('Gazetteer of Jinling'), a Ming dynasty gazetteer printed in 1624 with 40 different woodblock printed scenes of 17th-century Nanjing
akhoond (Chinese: ahong) from 1772. In 1755, the Qianlong Emperor sent an army to put down a Khoja rebellion in Kashgar
. Several officers from that campaign aided in the compilation of this gazetteer.
Map of the Fengshan County of "Taiwan Prefectural Gazetteer", published in 1696 during the Kangxi Emperor's reign in the Qing dynasty

In Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) China, the Yuejue Shu (越絕書) written in 52 AD is considered by modern sinologists and historians to be the prototype of the gazetteer (Chinese: difangzhi), as it contained essays on a wide variety of subjects including changes in territorial division, the founding of cities, local products, and customs.[29] However, the first gazetteer proper is considered to be the Chronicles of Huayang by Chang Qu 常璩. There are over 8,000 gazetteers of pre-modern China that have survived.[30][31][32] Gazetteers became more common in the Song dynasty (960–1279), yet the bulk of surviving gazetteers were written during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and Qing dynasty (1644–1912).[30] Modern scholar Liu Weiyi notes that just under 400 gazetteers were compiled in the era between the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 and the Tang dynasty (618–907).[33] Gazetteers from this era focused on boundaries and territory, place names, mountains and rivers, ancient sites, local products, local myths and legends, customs, botany, topography, and locations of palaces, streets, temples, etc.[34] By the Tang dynasty the gazetteer became much more geographically specific, with a broad amount of content arranged topically; for example, there would be individual sections devoted to local astronomy, schools, dikes, canals, post stations, altars, local deities, temples, tombs, etc.[35] By the Song dynasty it became more common for gazetteers to provide biographies of local celebrities, accounts of elite local families, bibliographies, and literary anthologies of poems and essays dedicated to famous local spots.[33][36] Song gazetteers also made lists and descriptions of city walls, gate names, wards and markets, districts, population size, and residences of former prefects.[37]

In 610 after the

Chinese dynasty.[42]

Historian James M. Hargett states that by the time of the Song dynasty, gazetteers became far more geared towards serving the current political, administrative, and military concerns than in gazetteers of previous eras, while there were many more gazetteers compiled on the local and national levels than in previous eras.

county or monastery not to have a gazetteer was regarded as evidence that the place was inconsequential".[48]

While working in the

acquire information from foreign envoys about their respective homelands, and from these interrogations would produce maps supplemented by textual information.[49] Even within China, ethnographic information on ethnic minorities of non-Han peoples were often described in the local histories and gazetteers of provinces such as Guizhou during the Ming and Qing dynasties.[50] As the Qing dynasty pushed further with its troops and government authorities into areas of Guizhou that were uninhabited and not administered by the Qing government, the official gazetteers of the region would be revised to include the newly drawn-up districts and non-Han ethnic groups (mostly Miao peoples) therein.[50] While the late Ming dynasty officials who compiled the information on the ethnic groups of Guizhou offered scanty details about them in their gazetteers (perhaps due to their lack of contact with these peoples), the later Qing dynasty gazetteers often provided a much more comprehensive analysis.[51] By 1673 the Guizhou gazetteers featured different written entries for the various Miao peoples of the region.[51] Historian Laura Holsteter writes on the woodblock print illustrations of Miao peoples in the Guizhou gazeteer, stating "the 1692 version of the Kangxi era gazetteer show a refinement in the quality of the illustrations by comparison to 1673".[52]

Historian

scholar-officials in order to succeed.[53] Hence, the gentry figures composing the gazetteers in the latter half of the Ming period spoke favorably of merchants, whereas before they were rarely mentioned.[53] Brook and other modern sinologist historians also examine and consult the local Ming gazetteers to compare population info with the contemporary central government records, which often provided dubious population figures that did not reflect the actually larger population size of China during the time.[54]

Although better known for his work on the

Gujin Tushu Jicheng encyclopedia, the early-to-mid Qing scholar Jiang Tingxi aided other scholars in the compilation of the "Daqing Yitongzhi" ('Gazetteer of the Qing Empire').[55] This was provided with a preface in 1744 (more than a decade after Jiang's death), revised in 1764, and reprinted in 1849.[55]

The

Haiguo Tuzhi ('Illustrated Gazetteer of the Sea Kingdoms') by Wei Yuan in 1844 (with material influenced by the "Sizhou zhi" of Lin Zexu)[60] was printed in Japan two decades later 1854.[61] This work was popular in Japan not for its geographical knowledge, but for its analysis of potential defensive military strategy in the face of European imperialism and the Qing's recent defeat in the First Opium War due to European artillery and gunboats.[61]

Continuing an old tradition of fangzhi, the

CCP Propaganda Department on May 1, 1979, which urged for the revival of difangzhi.[64] This proposal was sponsored by Hu Yaobang in June 1979 while Hu Qiaomu of the CCP Politburo lent his support for the idea in April 1980.[64] The first issue of a modern national journal of difangzhi was issued by January 1981.[64]

Korea

In

Sejong's court.[67] King Sejong established the Joseon dynasty's first national gazetteer in 1432, called the "Sinch'an p'aldo" ('Newly Compiled Geographic Treatise on the Eight Circuits').[70] With additional material and correction of mistakes, the title of this gazetteer was revised in 1454 as the "Sejong Sillok chiriji" ('King Sejong's Treatise on Geography'), updated in 1531 under the title "Sinjŭng tongguk yŏji sŭngnam",[70] and enlarged in 1612.[69] The Joseon Koreans also created international gazetteers. The "Yojisongnam" gazetteer compiled from 1451 to 1500 provides a small description for 369 different foreign countries known to Joseon Korea in the 15th century.[66]

Japan

In

daimyō of the Ikeda household published the Biyō kokushi gazetteer for several counties in 1737.[74] World gazetteers were written by the Japanese in the 19th century, such as the Kon'yo zushiki ("Annotated Maps of the World") published by Mitsukuri Shōgo in 1845, the Hakkō tsūshi ("Comprehensive Gazetteer of the Entire World") by Mitsukuri Genpo in 1856, and the Bankoku zushi ("Illustrated Gazetteer of the Nations of the World"), which was written by an Englishman named Colton, translated by Sawa Ginjirō, and printed by Tezuka Ritsu in 1862.[57] Despite the ambitious title, the work by Genpo only covered Yōroppa bu ("Section on Europe") while the planned section for Asia was not published.[57] In 1979 the 50 volume gazeteer Nihon rekishi chimei taikei ("Japanese Historical Place Names") series was launched[75] and it is currently also available online with "200,000 headings with detailed explanations of [each] place name".[76]

South Asia

In pre-modern

Ain-e-Akbari, which included a gazetteer with valuable information on India's population in the 16th century.[79]

Muslim world

The pre-modern

Islamic world produced gazetteers. Cartographers of the Safavid dynasty of Iran made gazetteers of local areas.[80]

List of gazetteers

Worldwide

Antarctica

Australia

United Kingdom

India

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Gazetteer". Macmillan Dictionary. Macmillan. Retrieved 14 April 2023.
  2. ^ Webster's dictionary and Roget's thesaurus. Paradise Press Inc. 2006. p. 68. Retrieved 14 April 2023.
  3. ISBN 1577233603
    . Retrieved 14 April 2023.
  4. ^ Aurousseau, 61.
  5. ^ The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. p. Gazetteer, n3. Retrieved 25 December 2021.
  6. ^ a b c d e White, 658.
  7. ^ Thomas, 623–636.
  8. ^ Asquith, 703–724.
  9. ^ Tarn, 93–94.
  10. ^ a b Tarn, 94.
  11. ^ a b Brown (1954), 837.
  12. ^ Celoria, 387.
  13. ^ a b Wilson (2003), 98.
  14. ^ Harfield, 372.
  15. ^ Harfield, 373–374.
  16. ^ a b Ravenhill, 425.
  17. ^ a b Ravenhill, 424.
  18. ^ Ravenhill, 426.
  19. ^ a b c White, 657.
  20. ^ a b c d e White, 656.
  21. ^ White, 659.
  22. ^ Brown (1941), 153–154.
  23. ^ a b Brown (1941), 189.
  24. ^ Brown (1941), 189–190.
  25. ^ a b Brown (1941), 190.
  26. ^ Brown (1941), 194.
  27. ^ Aurousseau, 66.
  28. ^ Murphy, 113.
  29. ^ Hargett (1996), 406.
  30. ^ a b Hargett (1996), 405.
  31. ^ Thogersen & Clausen, 162.
  32. ^ Bol, 37–38.
  33. ^ a b Hargett (1996), 407.
  34. ^ Hargett (1996), 408.
  35. ^ Hargett (1996), 411.
  36. ^ Bol, 41.
  37. ^ Hargett (1996), 414.
  38. ^ Hargett (1996), 409–410.
  39. ^ a b c Needham, Volume 3, 518.
  40. ^ Hsu, 90.
  41. ^ Hargett (1996), 409.
  42. ^ Hargett (1996), 410.
  43. ^ Hargett (1996), 412.
  44. ^ a b c Bol, 44.
  45. ^ a b Bol, 46.
  46. ^ Bol, 47.
  47. ^ a b Bol, 38.
  48. ^ Britnell, 237.
  49. ^ Schafer, 26–27.
  50. ^ a b Hostetler, 633.
  51. ^ a b Hostetler, 634.
  52. ^ Hostetler, 637–638.
  53. ^ a b c Brook, 6–7, 73, 90–93, 129–130, 151.
  54. ^ Brook, 28, 94–96, 267.
  55. ^ a b Fairbank & Teng, 211.
  56. ^ Wong, 44.
  57. ^ a b c Masuda, 18.
  58. ^ Masuda, 18–19.
  59. ^ Fairbank & Teng, 215.
  60. ^ Masuda, 32.
  61. ^ a b Masuda, 23–24.
  62. ^ Vermeer 440.
  63. ^ Thogersen & Clausen, 161–162.
  64. ^ a b c d Thogersen & Clausen, 163.
  65. ^ Vermeer, 440–443.
  66. ^ a b McCune, 326.
  67. ^ a b Provine, 8.
  68. ^ Lewis, 225–226.
  69. ^ a b Pratt & Rutt, 423.
  70. ^ a b Lewis, 225.
  71. ^ Miller, 279.
  72. ^ Taryō, 178.
  73. ^ Levine, 78.
  74. ^ Hall, 211.
  75. ^ Yasuko Makino,"Heibonsha" (entry), The Oxford Companion to the Book, oxfordreference.com. Retrieved 28 June 2022.
  76. ^ Nihon rekishi chimei taikei (日本歴史地名大系) = Japanese Historical Place Names, ku.edu. Retrieved 28 June 2022.
  77. ^ Gole, 102.
  78. ^ Baliga, 255.
  79. ^ Floor & Clawson, 347–348.
  80. ^ King, 79.

References

Look up gazetteer in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Media related to Gazetteers at Wikimedia Commons

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