Agricultural ·Early Modern ·Regional ·Near East & N. Africa

Saharan Date-Palm Oases & Caravan Routes

Oasis settlements and the trans-Saharan routes that linked them.

517 records 1500–1900 CE 29.13° N · 7.50° E

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Fig. 1 Interactive distribution of the 517 geolocated records on a live carto-positron base · globe / flat projection · decimal degrees (WGS 84).

Abstract

A linked dataset of date-palm oasis settlements and the caravan itineraries connecting them across the early-modern Sahara. Nodes carry estimated palm counts and water-source type; edges record documented route segments between staging points.

Record

Theme	Agricultural — land use & cultivation
Region	Near East & N. Africa
Temporal range	1500–1900 CE
Geographic coverage	Regional
Records	517 geolocated entities
Data source	Wikidata + archival gazetteer
Centroid	29.13° N · 7.50° E
Last revised	Mar 2026

Provenance & sources

Compiled from a curated spreadsheet corpus (n = 517) and reconciled against Wikidata entities. Geographic coordinates were verified against published gazetteers prior to publication.

· accessed 2026-03-12

SPARQL query

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?coord ?inception WHERE { ?item wdt:P31 ?class . ?item wdt:P625 ?coord . OPTIONAL { ?item wdt:P571 ?inception . } SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". } }

Recommended citation

Ortelius Editorial Board, ed. “Saharan Date-Palm Oases & Caravan Routes” [dataset]. Ortelius: A Research Atlas of Thematic Cartography, Study AT-018. 2026. doi:10.5281/ortelius.018

DATASET CC BY 4.0 · ENRICHMENT CC0 · CARTOGRAPHY MIT

Data & reproducibility

The published dataset is distributed as CSV with a derived GeoJSON edition; coordinates are decimal degrees on the WGS 84 datum. DOI 10.5281/ortelius.018.

↓ data.csv ↓ data.geojson