The Sasanian Empire Project - Technical Summary

The Sasanian Empire Project is one of the first ECAI electronic publication projects. The primary focus of the project is The Sasanian Seals Collection of Edward Gans currently housed at the Near Eastern Studies Department, University of California, Berkeley. For further information on the conception and development of the Sasanian Seals project, see The ECAI Sasanian ePublication by Jeanette Zerneke. Additional data layers are included in the project to provide contextual information for the Sasanian Seal Collection and demonstrate access to a variety of data types in ECAI publications. The project demonstrates the use of technology and tools widely available to humanities scholars to create a publication with high scholarly standards, documentation of the data resources, and a highly useful graphical time/place user interface. Development of the electronic publication required a small digitization and programming investment by the scholars. The publication takes advantage of the program development by ECAI of the TimeMap Toolkit and TMView programs.

1. Publish information on the Sasanian Seal Collection of Edward Gans held at the University of California, Berkeley, to promote wider accessibility and use of the collection as a scholarly tool.
2. Provide more secure storage and archive for the Seal Collection information.
3. Provide documented contextual information to increase understanding of the Sasanian Empire and the Sasanian Seal Collection.
4. Encourage research on the Sasanian Empire including enhancement of the Sasanian Seal Collection. In particular, it is hoped that provenance information for the seals can begin to be determined from information from existing resources in museums and archeological collections.
5. Provide a model and prototype for future electronic publications of seal, rubbings, coin and similar object collections.

Basic Background Information on the Sasanian Empire

A short summary of the history of the Sasanian Empire written by Guitty Azarpay is included for orientation and educational use.

Three representations of the Sasanian Empire are included in the publication. See: http://ecai.org/sasanianweb/sasanianmapmenu.html. Two maps are scanned from a collection of maps compiled as part of "Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients.":
     http://ecai.org/sasanianweb/maps/map_of_sasanian.htm
     http://ecai.org/sasanianweb/maps/sasanianbigmap50pct.htm

The other two are layers indicating the approximate extent of the empire at two time periods derived from "The History Atlas of Asia" by Ian Barnes and Robert Hudson, published by MacMillan.

Requests to use the material on the web for educational purposes have been sent to both publishers and are in the process of negotiation.

Ruth Mostern, ECAI, University of California, Berkeley, and Karen Kemp, University of Redlands, excerpted locations in the Sasanian Empire from the Tübinger map(B VI 3). Four layers of information from the Tübinger map are presented. The first is a set of Sasanian place names and locations and the level of certainty with which they are known. The other three show the locations of mints, state temples and official administrative offices in the Sasanian Empire.

Professor Guitty Azarpay, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, provided photos and information on five major sites in the Sasanian Empire. The background information includes basic information on the location and between six and eight images with descriptions for each site. Bibliographic information is included for each photograph.

The Collection of Seals and its history is described in the accompanying publication titled Sasanian Seals from the Collection of the Late Edward Gans, at the University of California, Berkeley. The data collection and cataloging of the Seal Collection are described in this document. The Seals themselves are currently housed at the Near Eastern Studies Department, University of California, Berkeley.

The electronic publication of the Seal Collection includes the document describing the collection and an online web application to search and display individual seals. Three images of each seal are included. Two of the images show the seal itself, one in profile and the other the seal face. The third image is a photo of the impression of the seal made by Catherine Demos, Graduate Student Curator for the project. The seals are cataloged based on a categorization scheme developed by Rika Gyselen (Catalogue des sceaux, camées et bulles sassanides de la Bibliothèque Nationale et du Musée du Louvre I, Collection générale, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 1993) and described in the seal collection document. The web application allows searching the collection by category, material, shape or local collection number. In addition, a cross-reference list of the various numbering schemes for the seals is included.

Introduction

The IT Architecture for the Sasanian Empire Project includes distributed resources and was designed to allow access to the majority of the resources through multiple methods. The Sasanian Empire Website enables browser access to documents and images. Spatio-temporal graphic access to the resources is enabled through the TMView the TimeMap Project desktop browser interface developed by Ian Johnson at the University of Sydney for ECAI. The primary technical components of the project are described below. The components are each fairly technically simple and can be easily converted to new generations of technology as needed in the future.

The Web site (on the ECAI server at: ecai.org/sasanianweb ) brings together many of the resources of the Sasanian Empire publication for browser access. The site allows access to the Sasanian Seals Collection, the Sasanian Empire background information, Sasanian site images and background information, the Sasanian Empire maps and information on the Sasanian Empire project. The main web pages and table of contents are in basic HTML.

The primary document titled Sasanian Seals from the Collection of the Late Edward Gans, at the University of California, Berkeley, is available as a standard HTML file and as a PDF file.

The seal stones were photographed and the digital images prepared and color corrected by Koorosh Angali in December 1999, April and December 2000, and February 2001.

Camera and photograph specifications are listed below:

Camera: Olympus, OM 1.
Lenses: G. Zuiko, Auto-S, 1:1.4, f=50 mm; Starblitz, Zoom-Macro 28-80mm, 1:35-45, f=62 mm.
Filters: Prisma close-up set, 49 mm; Vivitar close-up set, 62 mm, Tiffen, blue: 80 B, 62 mm; Toyo, blue: 80 A, 49 mm, Toyo, Polarizing filter, 62 mm.
Film: Kodak, Elite chrome, tungsten, 160T.

The slides of the seal images were scanned using the Kodak photo-CD process. The originals are currently stored in the ECAI offices. Medium resolution images were converted from the Kodak CDs to JPEGs and stored on the ECAI server ( ecai.org/sasanianweb ) for use in the Sasanian Seals web application. The seal impressions were scanned by Catherine Demos, a graduate student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, using a flat bed scanner and stored as Photoshop files. See Creation of the Archive for details of this process. The Photoshop files were then converted to JPEG files which are stored on the ECAI server for use in the web application.

The Sasanian site photographs are slides from the collection of Guitty Azarpay. The original slides are stored at the Department of Near Eastern Studies, UCB. The slides were scanned onto Kodak photo-CDs. The original CDs are stored in the ECAI offices. JPEGs from the medium resolution images are stored on the ECAI server.

Approximately 70mb of image files are stored on the ECAI server for the Sasanian Empire Web site and Sasanian Seals web application.

For archiving, the Kodak photo-cd 2048 by 3072 pixel images were converted to uncompressed Tiff images at 550ppi using Photoshop 6.

Sasanian Maps

Outlines of the Sasanian Empire in two time periods were constructed from maps included in "The History Atlas of Asia" by Ian Barnes and Robert Hudson. The maps were also scanned to credit the original sources document. They were scanned on a flat bed scanner at high-resolution and stored as TIFF images. The scans were converted to JPEG images for use on the Web site and in the TimeMap project for the documentation file. The original scanned images are currently stored in the ECAI offices. The Sasanian Empire map and the relief and hydrology map from the Tübinger collection were scanned at very high resolution by a professional service and are approximately 100mb in size each. The files were converted to a MrSid file for the TimeMap project. Jpeg versions are available on the website.

Gazetteer Layers

The Gazetteer layers are accessible through TimeMap only, not via the Sasanian Web site. The layers are shape files with associated attribute data stored in .dbf files. The gazetteer layers were developed by extracting and tabulating selected information from the Tübinger Sasanian Empire Map, B VI 3. The locations were geo-referenced by visually determining approximate latitude and longitude on the Tübinger map. Certainty of the location information as indicated on the orginal map is an attribute of the data. The gazetteer layers are registered with the ECAI Metadata Clearinghouse and served by the ECAI server in Sydney so scholars can use them as reference layers in other projects.

Sasanian Seals Database

A catalog of the Sasanian Seals categorized by theme and motif following the work of Rika Geselen as documented in the Sasanian Seal Collection document was developed at the Near Eastern Studies department at UC Berkeley under the direction of Guitty Azarpay. The catalog was input into a FileMaker Pro database.(See: Creation of the Archive.) The images of the Seal impressions were linked to the data table making a massive table of approximate 3.5 gigabytes of data. For the Sasanian Seals electronic publication this database was converted by Jeanette Zerneke to a Microsoft Access database with several tables separating the lookup table information from the data. The filenames for the image files are stored in the database not the images or links to the images.

Web Application

A web searching and display function was developed under the direction of Jeanette Zerneke in the spring of 2000. The search programs allow users to conduct targeted searches through a main menu of primary attributes: catalog theme, seal shape, seal material, inscription type or UC Berkeley catalog number. Each primary search type leads to a secondary menu then to a browse screen with results tailored to that search type. For example, a search by theme results in data that includes seal impression images, Berkeley classification numbers, descriptions and inscriptions data, while a search by shape results in data that includes seal profile images, Berkeley classification numbers, color translucency and wear data. By clicking on the thumbnail image, users then navigate to a complete catalog record for each seal that includes three thumbnail images: seal image, impression image and profile image. A full screen view of those images completes the application.

A separate web application was developed to access the Sasanian site images. Each site has a site index HTML page, which provides access to individual image records. Larger versions of the images are linked to the individual record pages. This application is also served from the IAS web application server.

Catherine Demos of the Near Eastern Studies Department, UC Berkeley, provided user interface design advice. Greg Pyatt at International and Area Studies, UC Berkeley, did the majority of programming. The web applications are written in ASP. Microsoft Internet Information Server on an IAS web server at UC Berkeley is serving the application. Finally the web application URL was registered in the ECAI Metadata Clearinghouse using the TimeMap Toolkit so the Seal search application layer can be added to TimeMap projects.

A TimeMap project was created to access the Sasanian Empire Project data through TMView the TimeMap desktop spatio-temporal browser. A basic background country boundary layerfor the whole earth was included. This allows users to view the Sasanian map layers and access Internet resources through the time/place interface.

The Sasanian Empire TimeMap project illustrates access to a variety of resource materials through the time/place interface.

The project uses a standard world country boundary file as a background and context layer. The images of the Sasanian Empire maps are displayed as JPEG or MrSid files registered to the approximate location they represent.

The gazetteer layers including the general gazetteer and the location of government mints, religious centers and administrative offices are displayed as GIS layers with the information about each site as the attribute data. No further resources are linked to these layers.

The entire collection of seals is known to be from the Sasanian Empire, however, the individual seals have no provenance. Therefore the Sasanian Seal Collection information is linked to a polygon approximating the maximum extent of the Sasanian Empire.

A separate layer identifies five major sites in the Sasanian Empire documented by Guitty Azarpay. The tabular data behind the layer can be displayed and the Web URL for each site is linked to the specific site on the map layer. The site URL is accessed from the atlas. From the site index page individual site images with descriptions are available.

Archiving of the data contents of the publication without it's current functionality can be done without significant difficulty. Copies of the publication web pages and images are being archived by the California Digital Library(CDL) to ensure persistence of the the publication contents. High-resolution archival copies of the seal images will be stored by CDL in a standard formats for possible use in future applications. These higher resolution images don’t need to be accessible for general web browsing at this time but may need to be added to applications in the future. Data for the GIS layers and map images are being served by the ECAI server at UCB. Copies of this information is being archived by CDL. The Sasanian Seals database and screen size jpeg images are also being served by the ECAI server at UC Berkeley. This server has a backup service provided by UC Berkeley. The seal catalog data, separate from the application, will be archived in a standard format for future use.

Maintaining the persistence of the functionality of the publication is a more difficult matter. Documentation of the programming and functionality of the publication are being submitted to CDL to archive with the publication contents. Maintenance of the data serving and migration of the publication contents and functions to new software versions will be done by ECAI. At some time in the future the system may be migrated to a system or archive with the capability of maintaining the functionality of the publication. Future archival solutions will continue to be under discussion with CDL.

Future Developments

• Continued work on the Gazetteer layers should include investigating the differences in transliteration between the Gazetteer layers and background information provided by Guitty to ensure that the background resources are properly located and identified.
• Collaboration with other Sasanian Seal researchers is under discussion. A collaborative project working with collections of documents showing the seal impressions has been proposed. Further research to begin to determine Sasanian Seal provenance by correlating information on seals from known archeological sites is desirable.
• ECAI and UC Berkeley would like to expand the seal database and web application to non-Sasanian seal collections at UC Berkeley by expanding the data definition and cataloging schema to cover a wider range of collections.
• ECAI is collaborating with researchers working on object collections such as rubbings or coins with the goal of developing standards for data definitions, cataloging and DTDs.
• Further ECAI projects will incorporate additional materials from the same geographic region such as information about the Kushan monasteries developed by Bruce Williams.
• David Forsyth at UC Berkeley is using the Sasanian seal images in his research to develop pattern recognition search tools.

Conclusions
Development of this electronic publication has accomplished many of its objectives and already begun to encourage further research. The project has taken existing scholarly resources, used standard technical tools and created a complex integrated resource. It has shown that ECAI publications can enhance the research capabilities of existing scholarly resources and encourage the development of both geographic information and integrated scholarly resources.