The Digital Text

Hestia takes its text of Herodotus’s Histories from the Perseus Digital Library. This collection not only provides a massive range of Classical works online for free, but also, by virtue of releasing them under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license, allows them to be used and adapted in whatever way users want.

In the Hestia project we built on the Perseus text’s semi-automated identification of places in the Histories, to provide not only better identifications but also alignment to the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places. (For a fuller account see under Publications.) Hestia phase 2 makes available this improved digital text with place references annotated to allow:

A basic search of places in Herodotus using an ARK database. If you would like to conduct various searches about the places in Herodotus, click on “The Database” button below.
The viewing of these places in Google Earth. If you would like to see where the places are that Herodotus mentions and find out what he has to say about them, click on the “GoogleEarth” button. (Note: (i) If you are on a school network, you might need to ask your IT team to open port 8080 open to allow the KML download; (ii) When GoogleEarth first opens, large red blobs will appear. Zoom in until they become sharply defined red dots representing different places: then you will be able to click on them and find out more.)
A reading of the text in our visualisation platform, adapted from GapVis. If you would like to read the Histories of Herodotus alongside the places mentioned within it, click on “HestiaVis” button.

The Database Google Earth HestiaVis

Alternatively, you might like to explore the open educational resources that we have built around our technologies in collaboration with The Open University’s OpenLearn unit. If you would like to explore more and take up the challenge of Herodotus’s Histories to go and pursue your own enquiry, click on the “Open Learn” button below.

Open Learn