GUIDE TO THE DATABASE

Ancient Toponym

It has been chosen to adopt the spelling used by Pleiades. In case the ancient toponym is not known, this field has been completed with the name of the current location, in order to make the alphabetical order possible.

Current Location

It is mainly based on the Barrington Atlas, Pleiades and de Graauw (2017).

Area

Region where the harbour was located.

Harbour-works

This field records the presence of infrastructures identified in a specific harbour. In scholarship, there is some confusion between the words ‘breakwater’ and ‘mole’, which are used indiscriminately to identify structures that define the seaward perimeter of the harbour (for more information on harbour-works and their purposes, see Chapter 4 of this volume). Where possible, I have sought to differentiate between simple breakwaters and structures used also for mooring purposes (‘moles’). However, in the cases where only 19th-century travellers’ accounts were known, I have reported the terms found in the publications.

Additional information on harbour-works can be found in the field labelled ‘Notes’.

Sources

In this field, there are sources that are contemporary to the chronological periods examined here but also later sources (abbreviations have been made according to the 4th Edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary and they appear in alphabetical order). The choice to include these is because they often provide interesting information on the harbour (water depth, protection against particular winds, options for anchorage), or the changes that occurred in its geomorphology. Sometimes, they have been recorded because they document the continual use of the harbour over time. Obviously, information inferred by literary sources should be interpreted with great caution, as they are subjective, their descriptions depending on the authors’ greater or lesser familiarity with maritime-related issues.

The list of sources is not exhaustive. Rather, they have been independently appraised by the author, who selected only those citations which, in her opinion, contain relevant information, referring explicitly to the existence of a harbour, to ships departing from, arriving to or anchoring at a specific place (in this case, the place is labelled as ‘anchorage’ in the field ‘Notes’).

With regard to the Periplus of Pseudo-Skylax, reference has been made only when the harbour is explicitly mentioned, e.g. ‘καì Ἀνακτόριον καì λιμὴν’ (Skyl. 34).

Notes

Each one of the 194 original entries has been assigned a number in order to facilitate the consultation of the Catalogue and allow the user to easily find the harbours mentioned in Mauro (2019). Numbers have been assigned according to an alphabetical order. Harbours added after the publication of the monograph will be assigned a progressive number, following the order in which they are added to this catalogue.

Additionally, in this field readers can find relevant information on the harbour (e.g., proposed chronology of the harbour-works, possible mention of the harbour as a ‘λιμὴν κλειστός’). Where the note ‘Anchorage’ is present, it means that the place has simply been referred to as a location where ships anchored.

References

It contains the main works (in alphabetical order) where it is possible to find information on a certain harbour.

(?)

In almost all the fields it possible to find a question mark (often in parentheses) to highlight uncertain information. In the case of harbour-works, it could mean that either the identification is not indisputable, or that scholarship reports the presence of a structure generally referred to as ‘ancient’, which could be (or not be) dated to the Archaic or Classical periods.