Hatra Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The site of Hatra is located in the Iraqi Jazirah, 60 km south-west from the modern city of Mosul. The origin of the site is almost unknown probably belonging to the Post-Assyrian period, according to the findings discovered by the Italian Archaeological Expedition in some trenches in the central area of the city.
Almost the entire amount of information regarding Hatra belongs to the 2nd and 3rd cent. AD, when the city achieved great importance reaching dimension of 300 ha and becoming the capital of a buffer state between Romans and Parthians. The scholars community generally calls this period ‘The Great Hatra’.
A sub-circular curtain wall, clearly detectable on the ground and on aerial and satellite images, delimited the urban surface. The complex city layout showed streets, squares, houses, schrines, necropolis mixed in an apparently “chaotic” way, giving the impression of an ‘Arab city’. A huge enclosure in stone, which encircled big temples, is located in the city centre.
Hatra was besieged three times by the Roman army during the 2nd cent. AD, but it was destroyed only in AD 241 by the Sasanian king, Shapur I.
Despite the effort of many archaeological expeditions, which worked on the site from the beginning of the 1900s, the city was unearthed only for a minimum part (approx. 15-20%) and, as some scholars proposed, it can be considered as a hidden treasure for the future archaeologists. Unfortunately, nowadays the site is under control of the so-called “Islamic State”, which has already destroyed the sculptural decoration of some of the temples of the Temenos area and it is unknown if a systematic pillage is still happening in the site.
As above remarked it is clear that working on the urbanism of such a complex city is a difficult and stimulating matter.
HatraGIS is the result of three-year efforts and it is, as almost all the archaeological GIS are, still unfinished. This project has been thought especially for the study of the urbanism of the city, even if its structure is flexible in order to support a possible implementation of new archaeological data from
field (SU, room and building forms). HatraGIS is a multilayer GIS, built in ArcGIS, which contains a huge amount of raster and vector data (20 layers), elaborated from published records or from data stored in the Archive of the Italian Archaeological Expedition. A fundamental component
of HatraGIS is the digitalised topography of the Italian Expedition, which was drawn during the 1980s
using a relative system of coordinates. In this poster I will explain the methodological approach used for the creation of the GIS, the encountered difficulties and the adopted solutions. A special section will be dedicated to the geo-referencing method employed in order to achieve precise results for a study of urbanism without having the possibility to
go to the ground and taking control points. Special attention will be paid to the catalogue of satellite images and aerial photographs, which are a fundamental component of HatraGIS.