What's New


Data fixes: March 26, 2022


This update merged two entries referring to the same place. The abstract of the vizier Jamāl al-Dīn was also corrected, and a new reference to that person entry in a primary source added


New time visualization module: December 3, 2021


Timelines are insufficient for representing modern people's mediated access to the past. They do not represent uncertainty well, and often we have conflicting dates for any given event. They also do not show us the provenance of the dates. We have developed a new temporal visualization module for HIMME that allows seeing when something (is alleged to have) happened, but also when it was written about, when it was copied in manuscript, and when it was edited and printed. This update put a temporal visualization module on every entry.


Regenerated entries: November 7-10, 2021


This update corrected Armenian colophon dates on 62 persons, 34 places, and 36 practices. It also merged a duplicate entry, added about 3 abstracts, and modified one place entry to correct a broken link to the Syriac Gazetteer.


Regenerated entries: September 16, 2021


This update added about 700 new abstracts, detangled 31 erroneously conflated entries, and modified the HTML to display more granular credit for the different contributions to each entry.


Regenerated entries: September 13-14, 2021


Entries were generated again in order to incorporate Nasir-i Khusraw practices, to include Ibn Battuta Arabic (the rest of persons and all the practices), to clean up practice names from Benjamin of Tudela, to incorporate many more Armenian citations for the titles Baron, Khan, and Catholicos, to refine the temporal data for interpolations in Chalkondyles' history and those parts of Ibn Battuta's travel account which survive in an autograph manuscript, and to consolidate another 114 entries that had inadvertently received two URIs. With this generation, the TEI XML records should be relatively stable, although additional data may be added, and the HTML view may continue to be enhanced. This update also added information to the search results list (place type, person gender and dates).


Regenerated entries: August 7, 2021


Entries were generated again in order to encode more granular credit for work on the project in each entry XML (especially in places), to consolidate 75 entries that had inadvertently received two URIs(!), to clean up some Arabic person names from Yaqut, and to include a few more Arabic names for Ibn Battuta's persons and a few more Wikipedia links.


Publication: August 1, 2021


The Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East is now publicly available! A few things still need to be cleaned up, and more functionality will be added soon, but please start using the search function to find what interests you. If you spot anything amiss, please contact us to let us know.