Places become decisions — the third dimension lights up
9 August 2026 · Nabu news
The library has always known when better than where: 708,905
documents name a findspot, but until this week only 151,157 carried a
machine-readable place identity. Two phases later the count is
585,682 — Girsu’s 37,000 tablets, Roman Milan’s thousand
inscriptions, and the Coptic monasteries of Upper Egypt all answer
nabu place now.
Three pieces made it happen. First, the gazetteers themselves came
local: Pleiades (42,284 places),
Trismegistos Geo (64,857 — of
which more below), and CIGS, the
Uppsala site index of the cuneiform world, whose legacy_name column
turns out to be byte-identical to CDLI’s own provenience strings — the
key that unlocked a quarter-million tablets. One namespaced index holds
them all; equivalences between them ride as crosswalk data (CIGS’s
own columns, plus a Wikidata harvest), never as guesses.
Second, nabu-places — the third sister registry, after the datasets and the lects. It records the matching decisions: that EDR’s “Mediolanum” is the Insubrian Milan and not one of five homonyms, that “Irisagrig (mod. uncertain)” is unlocatable because the site genuinely is, that “Middle Egypt (from Kairo to Assiut)” is a regional bin and not a place. 550 rows so far, every one reviewable, and an unlisted name stays visibly unmatched — coverage claims can’t inflate. The registry can also mint its own place records where text-analysis scholarship establishes a place no gazetteer registers — each with a required evidence trail.
Third, a new acquisition pattern. Trismegistos’s dump sits behind a
security check no script should try to defeat — so the library stopped
pretending otherwise: nabu sync trismegistos-geo prints the exact
browser steps, and when a human drops the download into incoming/, it
validates, archives the previous holding, and stamps full provenance.
High-value data that only a person can fetch is now a first-class
source, not a parked thread.
The census, honestly: twelve upstream references cite Pleiades ids that don’t exist (digit-swapped, mostly — the audit found the real ids), the long tail below the curated waves stays unmatched, and rundata’s Norse parishes want coordinates, not a classical gazetteer. All of it is on the new Places page.