Confusion about the hill of Prophitis Ilias (C1926)

Gary: ‘Don’t confuse me any more than I am already.’

Little Darlings [1980]

On the hill of Prophitis Elias, in Boeotia, there is a LH house.  It is described in Simpson, Farinetti, and Fossey and these are just the sources that I happen to have to hand.

The problem is that there is disagreement about where this hill is.

1.   Simpson says

"The hill of Ayios Ilias is about 2 km. to northeast of Schimatari and to east of the road to Dilisi."[1]

2.   Fossey says

"The hill of Prophitis Elias, a rounded eminence, lies c. 4.5 km. South East of Skhimatari, a little to the North of the New National Road and overlooking the entrance to the valley which leads to Dhilesi."[2]

3.   Farinetti says  (I have broken up her quote in order to give letters to her choices)[3]

“The site of Prophitis Ilias has been given different locations in different gazetteers and reports on the site:”

A.   “- a hill 2km to NE of Schimatari according to Prehistoric gazetteers.”

B.   “- a hill SE of Schimatari (4km!) overlooking the valley leading to Dilesi by the chapel of Ag.Paraskevi (mentioned by Brown – the excavator) according to Fossey (1988: 57)”

C.   “- A hill 2km from A.Dimitrios, at Schimatari station, to the right of the direct road to Dilesi, much nearer to the sea (to the NE of the shrine of A.Paraskevi on hill) according to Brown (Brown BSA 1905/6: 93ff). The Brown location is probably the right one. He excavated a LH house (BSA 1905/6: 94-5). At the site material from other Prehistoric periods (Late Neo, EH, MH) has also been found (Prehistoric gazetteers: HS&D 1979; Syriopoulos 1968; French 1972).”

First of all let’s clear up some preliminaries.

The church of Ayios Dimitrios at Schimatari station is here: 38.322313° N, 23.610635° E (F954 in my catalog).

The church of Ayia Paraskevi is here: 38.332400° N, 23.627994° E.  It is not on a hill.

When Dr. Farinetti says "to the NE of the shrine of A.Paraskevi on hill" she implies that A. Paraskevi itself is on a hill.  While she plainly says that, her phrasing is ambiguous and she may not have meant that literally.  She may have meant this: "(Prophitis Ilias) is near the shrine of A. Paraskevi and is on a hill."   I choose to understand her in my rewritten sense.

What everyone seems to agree on is that Prophitis Ilias is on a hill and that that hill is … somewhere.

Simpson (Alternative 1 above) says that it is 2 km. NE of Schimatari.  That looks like this:

I think that this is unsatisfactory because there are no reasonable hills nearby.

Alternative 2 is Fossey’s description which I show in the next photo.  

Taken literally (that is, drawing a line exactly 135° (SE) of Schimatari) this gives us an unsatisfactory result.  For one thing it is on the wrong side of the highway.  There is a candidate hill which I have marked on the photo.  It does roughly conform to Fossey’s description of the position of Prophitis Ilias.  Before discussing that let’s next examine Farinetti’s descriptions.

Her choice ‘A’ is just Simpson’s description and we have already dismissed that.

Her choice ‘B’ is her report of Fossey’s description.

Her choice ‘C’ looks like this:

In this photo I colored orange the region which describes her choice C.  From this we see that her choice ‘C’ can be made to harmonize with Fossey’s description; these two descriptions ‘B’ and ‘C’ refer to the same place.

Here are our criteria:

a.    Rounded hill

b.   SE (or on the ‘right’ side) of the road to Dilesi from Schimatari

c.    Commands the entrance to the Dilesi valley.

d.   SE of Schimatari

e.    About 2 km. from Ayios Dimitrios at Schimatari Station.

f.     About 4.5 km. from Schimatari itself.

g.    Near the church of Ayia Paraskevi

What location simultaneously satisfies all these criteria?  Let’s look at this photo in which I drew in the constraint lines.

Yep.  All the lines seem to converge at one point and that is the hill that we've been discussing.  Does it command or dominate the entrance to the Dilesi valley?  I put together the following pano from Google Street View.  

Here we’re looking over about 150°.  The road up the hill looks directly west; on the other side of the pano you can see the mountains of Euboea across the gulf to the ENE.

Exactly as Fossey describes, it overlooks the entrance to the Dilesi valley as we see in the next photo.

So here’s what I think.  I say that the hill at C1926 is the hill of Prophitis Ilias (38.336267 N, 23.623502 E) and that's where the LH house site is.  I still don’t know where on the hill that house was found and so I have set my uncertainty radius at 200 m.  In the next photo I marked what I think is a church, perhaps even the church of Prophitis Ilias, but I’m not certain of that identification.  

(Updated on May 26, 2019.  I have been able to confirm that this church is, indeed, the church of Prophetes Ilias.)

So that's the best that I can do for now.  If any of my readers know better where Profitis Ilias is located I would very much like to hear.  Don't be shy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Status of the Mycenaean Atlas Project

Currently prototyping an alpha online version of the Atlas.  I'm probably about two months away from making it available.

I've recently added twenty-four locations in the area of the Skourta plain (Farinetti [2009]), some eighty points in and around central Athens (Mountjoy, [2005]), and about forty points in Cyprus (van Wijngaarden [2002]).

Anyone who would like to have a copy of the MAP database can send an e-mail to bobconsoli 'at' gmail.com or leave a comment on any of my posts.  

A large (about 2400 page) .pdf document which describes the entire database is available for the asking.

To run the MAP database requires a SQL server running on your desktop computer.   MySQL is such a server and it is powerful, industry-standard, and free.  

I can and will make .kml or .kmz files, which can be opened directly in Google Earth, available to those who would like them.  

I can also create .csv files for people who would like to import Mycenaean Atlas Project data into Google Earth but would like it in tabular form.

If you like these posts then please follow me on Twitter (Squinchpix) or on Google+   (Robert Consoli)

Facebook?  Sorry.I.just.can't. 

Footnotes

[1] Simpson [1981], ‘B 47 Schimatari: Ayios Ilias’, 52.  And in Simpson and Dickinson [1979] 'F 59 Schimatari: Ayios Ilias', 221.  As Fossey (p. 57, fn. 53) notices the original excavator got the name wrong.  Simpson and Dickinson follow this error.  It's 'Prophitis Ilias'.

[2] Fossey [1988], ‘5. Prophitis Elias’, 57. And see the additional bibliographic material at that place.

[3] Farinetti [2009], 11.  The relevant components are TA_51, TA_52, and TA_53.  The location of TA_55, a MH cemetery (I have called it C822), depends materially on getting the location of TA_53 correct.

Bibliography

Farinetti [2009]: Appendix I.14; The Tanagra plain and Eastern Boeotia in Farinetti, Emeri. Boeotian Landscapes; A GIS-based study for the reconstruction and interpretation of the archaeological datasets of ancient Boeotia. Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University.  2009.

Fossey [1988]: Fossey, John M., Topography and Population of Ancient Boiotia, Ares publishers Inc., Chicago, Illinois.  1988.

Simpson [1981]: Simpson, Richard Hope. Mycenaean Greece. Park Ridge, New Jersey: Noyes Press, 1981.

Simpson and Dickinson [1979]:  Simpson, Richard Hope and O.T.P.K. Dickinson,  A Gazetteer of Aegean Civilization in the Bronze Age, Vol. I: The Mainland and the Islands, Paul Åströms Förlag, Goteborg. 1979.

Using What 3 Words to establish locations in the Mycenaean Atlas Project

Earl: ... Then we're off to Haiti!

Carol: Not Haiti, Tahiti!  [1]

We can sympathize with poor Earl's tragic confusion.  Accurate location names and positions are crucial in geography.

In addition to the traditional lat/lon pair as a position indicator for Mycenaean sites, I’ve become interested in other ways of specifying positions.  To that end I have added two new methods in a ‘coords’ table for the Mycenaean Atlas Project.  One method is more traditional, the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) system, and one is more cutting edge, the What3Words system.

The What3words website has aroused interest because the designers appear to have pioneered an entirely new method of specifying locations.  Instead of the relatively cumbersome lat/lon pair (or the UTM triplet) it has divided the entire surface of the earth into 3 meter squares.  Each of these squares is uniquely identified with a three word sequence.  For example, the lat/lon pair of 43.553997, -116.276693 maps onto the three-word sequence ‘green.ideas.sleep’ (hello Noam Chomsky!) which is somewhere in Idaho.  What3Words is being adopted by a number of tech firms.  For example, Mapillary has just incorporated it into its system.

To convert a lat/lon pair into the three word designator (triplet) you go to this URL:

You check the box that says ‘I agree to the what3words terms and conditions’ and you then enter your lat/lon pair into the box that says ‘Convert coordinates to 3 word addresses’. 

Entering the pair -17.532988°, -149.561509° (Papeete in Tahiti) returns the triplet: ‘senior.obeyed.gulped’.  This triplet is unique and unchanging.

What 3 Words conversion box.  Here converting a lat/lon pair into an English word triplet.

To convert a What3Words triplet back into a lat/lon pair you go to the same URL and enter the three words into the box that is labelled ‘Convert 3 word addresses to coordinates’. 

Entering the triplet of ‘senior.obeyed.gulped’ returns the original lat/lon pair.

What 3 Words conversion box.  Here converting an English word triplet into a lat/lon pair.

The vendor’s web site reasonably says that most places on earth have no addresses and that the three-word system is the answer.  I think that this is partly true but I’ve actually included the What3Words system into the database simply because it’s easier to remember a position this way.

I have added three fields to the ‘coords’ table to support What3Words.  They are

W3W1: varchar(20);

W3W2: varchar(20);

W3W3: varchar(20);

 

A simple query to retrieve (from the MAP database) the three-word key for a particular site would be this:

 

select concat (W3W1,', ', W3W2,', ', W3W3) from coords where pk = 'C1900';

(C1900 is in the Skourta Valley, north of Attica.)

This query returns the triplet: 'swaggers, participating, remark'

The What3Words website also makes an API available so that you can reach their conversion routines from software that you can write.  Here's an example of what this could look like (converting a lat/lon pair into a three-word key) when embedded in your PHP code[2]:

$curl = curl_init();

curl_setopt_array($curl, array(

CURLOPT_URL => "https://api.what3words.com/v2/reverse?coords=$plat%2C$plon&key=YOUR_KEY_HERE&lang=en&format=json&display=full",

CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,

CURLOPT_ENCODING => "",

CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10,

CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 30,

CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,

CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => "GET",));

$response = curl_exec($curl);

$err = curl_error($curl);

curl_close($curl);

if ($err) 

       {echo "cURL Error #:" . $err;}  

else 

{

$response1 = str_replace("\"", "", $response);

$pieces = explode(":", $response1);  

$three_Words = explode(",", $pieces[7]);

$W3W = explode(".",$three_Words[0]);

}

This requires that a curl session be initiated so you'll want the Curl dll's to be available in your language system.  The only code you have to pay attention to here is in red.  That's the the API key which you get from What3Words.  You also make sure that your latitude is in $plat and your longitude is in $plon.  The result is in the value $W3W which is an array of three parts which contains the three words.  If you don't choose to break up the return string then the three-word result is in $response which I've set in purple.

Status of the Mycenaean Atlas Project

I've recently added twenty-four locations in the area of the Skourta plain (Farinetti [2009]), some eighty points in and around central Athens (Mountjoy, [2005]), and about forty points in Cyprus (van Wijngaarden [2002]).

Anyone who would like to have a copy of the MAP database can send an e-mail to bobconsoli 'at' gmail.com or leave a comment on any of my posts.  

A large (about 2400 page) .pdf document which describes the entire database is available for the asking.

To run the MAP database requires a SQL server running on your desktop computer.   MySQL is such a server and it is powerful, industry-standard, and free.  

I can and will make .kml or .kmz files, which can be opened directly in Google Earth, available to those who would like them.  

I can also create .csv files for people who would like to import Mycenaean Atlas Project data into Google Earth but would like it in tabular form.

If you like these posts then please follow me on Twitter (Squinchpix) or on Google+   (Robert Consoli)

Facebook?  Sorry.I.just.can't.

Footnotes
[1] Ruthless People [1986].  It was written by Dale Launer and inspired by O. Henry's 'The Ransom of Red Chief'.
[2] Other languages are supported by this very rich API interface.

Bibliography

Farinetti [2009]: Farinetti, Emeri.  Boeotian landscapes: a GIS-based study for the reconstruction and interpretation of the archaeological datasets of ancient Boeotia. Ph.D. Dissertation.  University of Leiden, Netherlands, 2009.

Mountjoy [2005]: Mountjoy, Pamela.  Mycenaean Athens.  Paul Åströms Förlag, Jonsered, Sweden. 1995

van Wijngaarden [2002]:   van Wijngaarden, G.,  Use and Appreciation of Mycenaean Pottery in the Levant, Cyprus and Italy (ca. 1600 - 1200 BC).  Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and Amsterdam University Press. 2002.,