Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia

Abstract

A Historical Geographic Information System (HGIS) is a way to create a time-variable spatial representation of geographic features, which is considered as a bridging technology between geography and history in a digital framework. The history of Makkah (Mecca), Saudi Arabia covers several thousand years, with numerous sites representing important historical landmarks. As Makkah is the most important city in Islamic history, developing a HGIS for it would have significant meaning for the more than a billion Muslims around the world. A state-of-the-art HGIS has been developed for Makkah through acquiring, integrating, manipulating, and analyzing an extensive collection of spatial and non-spatial datasets. This research has resulted in the publishing of a bilingual atlas of historical sites in Makkah that contains more than seventy historical locations and covers almost a thousand years (500s to 1500s). Work is underway to also build an online HGIS on the Harvard WorldMap platform, so that materials in the atlas and beyond will be made available for researchers and the general public from any part of the world through a web-based dynamic mapping site. Future work may propel the system into an augmented reality innovation. This paper introduces the background and historical-geographic materials, summarizes the technical challenges and solutions, and presents milestones and perspectives for this ongoing effort.

Full text

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Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza, Gomaa M. Dawod, Ramaze A. Elzahrany, and Mohammad M. Mirza
Regional Conference on Surveying & Development
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 3-6 October 2015

1
Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza1, 2,3, Gomaa M. Dawod4, Ramaze A. Elzahrany1,2, and Mohammad
M. Mirza5
1 Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia, meraj@mmirza.com
2 KACST GIS Technology Innovation Center, Makkah, Saudi Arabia
3 Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University, USA
4 Survey Research Institute, Giza, Egypt
5 Colorado State University, Denver, Colorado, USA
Abstract
A Historical Geographic Information System (HGIS) is a way to create a time-variable spatial
representation of geographic features, which is considered as a bridging technology between
geography and history in a digital framework. The history of Makkah (Mecca), Saudi Arabia
covers several thousand years, with numerous sites representing important historical landmarks.
As Makkah is the most important city in Islamic history, developing a HGIS for it would have
significant meaning for the more than a billion Muslims around the world. A state-of-the-art
HGIS has been developed for Makkah through acquiring, integrating, manipulating, and
analyzing an extensive collection of spatial and non-spatial datasets. This research has resulted in
the publishing of a bi-lingual atlas of historical sites in Makkah that contains more than seventy
historical locations and covers almost a thousand years (500s to 1500s). Work is underway to
also build an online HGIS on the Harvard WorldMap platform, so that materials in the atlas and
beyond will be made available for researchers and the general public from any part of the world
through a web-based dynamic mapping site. Future work may propel the system into an
augmented reality innovation. This paper introduces the background and historical-geographic
materials, summarizes the technical challenges and solutions, and presents milestones and
perspectives for this on-going effort.
Keywords: Geographic Information System (GIS), Historical GIS, Atlas, Makkah, Saudi Arabia,
WorldMap
Introduction
The concept of documenting and mapping historical data is an old practice in geography and in
field of mapping. Maps showing historical information are used in a simple manner for
visualizing and even analyzing geographical data which refers to the past. There are many
examples of printed atlases which have been developed representing the geographic patterns of
specific events over space and time. Concerning Islam, several atlases have been published
covering the geographic and historical expansion of the Islamic empire (e.g. Ruthven and Nanji

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Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza, Gomaa M. Dawod, Ramaze A. Elzahrany, and Mohammad M. Mirza
Regional Conference on Surveying & Development
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 3-6 October 2015

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2004, Mones1987, and Abu Khalil 2005b). However, such maps have certain limitations
compared with modern day geographic information systems. For instance, due to the large extent
of the subject in both geographic coverage (almost half of the world) and historical time span
(about fourteen centuries), such atlases can only give a general picture of the subject. In addition
presenting historical data on regular printed maps in a non-digital format, is restricted by map
size, scale, and quality. In such an environment, combining and/or comparing different maps is
not a simple task mainly due to the great variation in mathematical projection and spatial
reference of the maps involved (Mirza 2013).
Geographic Information System (GIS) represent a computer-based technology for collecting,
storing, archiving, querying, analyzing, visualizing, and presenting large amounts of spatial and
non-spatial data.. GIS has been used in a wide range of applications world-wide, with the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) being no exception. Some examples of GIS applications in
KSA include urban growth monitoring (Al-Ghamdi et al. 2012), flood management (Dawod et al.
2011), soil management (El Bastawesy et al. 2012), and the spatial monitoring of disease
(Khormi et al. 2012).
Historical Geographic Information System (HGIS) is a discipline within GIS which deals with
historical events, data, and geographic locations (Bol, 2013). HGIS provides a new approach for
studying history that allows for spatial historical analysis and the linking of historical data to
specific geographical locations (Schlichting, 2008). HGIS can be considered a potentially
revolutionary approach linking both geography and history together to study patterns of changes
over space and time (Bailey and Schick, 2009). A major application of HGIS is urban history
analysis in an integrated digital framework that comprises heterogeneous data sources (Raymond
2011). HGIS has many merits such as the spatial-referencing of all data which allows for rapid
map production , and the ability to perform geographic analysis of past events (DeBats and
Gregory, 2011).
HGIS is utilized in a wide range of applications. For example, at the city or local level, Ayhan
and Cubukcu (2010) applied a 4D spatial analysis to explore urban changes of the city of Izmer,
Turkey based on the historical distribution of mosques. HGIS was also utilized in the
construction of a historical heterogeneous database for Macedonia, Northern Greece for the
purpose of locating hundreds of unknown buried ancient constructions (Kaimarisa et al., 2011).
Another HGIS has investigated historical spatial occurrences of soil liquefaction as a measure for
earthquake hazards in Greece since 1509, which could be valuable for urban planners
(Papathanassiou and Pavlides, 2011). Additionally, HGIS can be used as a platform for public
participation in historical site usage and preservation, and offers new understandings of the
landscape of such historical locations (Algeo et al., 2011). A unique HGIS has been utilized to
analyze visitation patterns for commercial hotels in three small places in central Pennsylvania,
USA during the late 19th century (Fyfe et al., 2009). Moreover, HGIS has been used for
modeling drought and population change in Canada (McLeman et al., 2010).

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Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza, Gomaa M. Dawod, Ramaze A. Elzahrany, and Mohammad M. Mirza
Regional Conference on Surveying & Development
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 3-6 October 2015
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Several national HGIS projects have been carried out in the last years or decade. Some of them
are available online. Examples of such activities include the US national historical GIS
(https://www.nhgis.org/), the Canadian national historical sites
(http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/index.aspx), the US national register of historical places
(http://www.nps.gov/nr/), the Great Britain HGIS (http://www.port.ac.uk/research/gbhgis/), and
the China historical GIS developed by Harvard University (http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/).
Other HGIS projects have been established at smaller scales, state or county for instance, such as
the one for the Goodhue county of Minnesota, USA
(http://maps.co.goodhue.mn.us/historicplaces/), and the Ohio state online historical mapping
system (http://www.ohiohistory.org/ohio-historic-preservation-office/online-mapping-system).
This research aims to use GIS to integrate several data types (maps, aerial photographs, satellite
imageries, and non-spatial data) within a framework representing the geographic locations of
historical events in Makkah city. The first product of the study will be an atlas of historical
locations within Makkah. Work is underway to also build an online HGIS on the WorldMap
platform, so that materials in the atlas and beyond will be made available for researchers and the
general public from any part of the world through a web-based dynamic mapping site. Future
work may propel the system into an augmented reality implementation (Elzahrany and Mirza,
2011).
Study Area
The city of Makkah (Mecca) is located in the southwest of KSA, about 80 km east of the Red Sea
(Fig. 1). It extends from longitudes 39o 35’ E to 40o 02’ E, and from latitudes 21o 09’ N to 21o
37’ N. Makkah is a unique city for Muslims around the world, since it contains the holy mosque.
From a religious point of view, a Muslim should perform a pilgrimage (called Hajj, which means
visiting Makkah during the 8th - 12th days of the 12th month in the Lunar year) once in his/her
life. Thus, hundreds of thousands Muslims gather in Makkah yearly. Also, Muslims perform a
religious journey, called Omrah, to Makkah year-round. From an Islamic perspective, Makkah is
the first place created on the Earth’s surface and the holy mosque in Makkah is the first "God
House" for worship on Earth. Thus, the history of Makkah has been unfolding even before the
start of the Islam itself. However, the main historical event in Makkah was the commencement of
the Islamic religion in year 610 AD. It is known that Prophet Muhammad stayed 13 years in
Makkah trying to convert people to Islam before he was obligated to leave for Al-Madinah (about
400 kilometers north of Makkah). Even though the Prophet Muhammad established Makkah
eight years later, Al-Madinah stood as the capital of the new Islamic state. However, Makkah has
remained the religious capital of the Islamic world and the most-important city for Muslims
throughout the last fourteen centuries.

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Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza, Gomaa M. Dawod, Ramaze A. Elzahrany, and Mohammad M. Mirza
Regional Conference on Surveying & Development
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 3-6 October 2015
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Figure 1: The study area in relation to the Arabic Peninsula
It is amazing to know that there was an attempt to make historical maps two centuries ago. That
was when the Turkish officer Ayoub Sabry, in his book "A Mirror of Makkah" in 1872, drew an
imaginary sketch showing Makkah’s landscape in the pre-Islam period (i.e., before the 5th
Georgian century), as seen in Fig. 2d. He constructed this 3D image based on the historical
description of Makkah as set by Kosaii Ibn Kalab (the 5th grandfather of Prophet Muhammad)
when he ordered residents to leave some open spaces around the holy Kaaba and regulated
buildings to be in circles around it with some radial streets to ease the access to it (ibid).
Recently, several atlases have been published concerning the Islamic history including the city of
Makkah. For example, Abu Khalil published an atlas regarding the geographic places mentioned
in the teachings of Prophet Muhammad (2005a). He also produced another atlas about geographic
sites mentioned in the holy Qur'an (2003). The nature of these two atlases is general, with no
details about the geography of Makkah itself. Mirza and Shawoosh (2011) published an
illustrated atlas for Makkah and its holy shrines.
GIS was utilized in Makkah as a platform for four dimensional analyses over time, which can be
seen as a specific application of HGIS. For example, Shehata (2007) carried out a 4D GIS to
investigate the urban and landscape changes in the central region of Makkah in the last three
decades. Similarly, Al-Ghamdi et al. (2012) constructed a GIS to estimate the urban growth of
Makkah, and the corresponding flood hazards, over the period of 1947-2010.
Additionally, a large amount of historical geographic information about Makkah can be found in
literature. Such historical data describing geographic sites could be extremely valuable for
developing an HGIS about the holy city. For example, Al-Azraqi wrote one of the most famous
geographic books about Makkah in 864 (Al-Azraqi, 2003). The two-volume book dealt with both
the history and geography of the holy city, with a detailed verbal description of the famous
geographic sites. Similarly, Al-Mekki developed a six-volume book about the history, geography,

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Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza, Gomaa M. Dawod, Ramaze A. Elzahrany, and Mohammad M. Mirza
Regional Conference on Surveying & Development
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 3-6 October 2015

5
and people of Makkah (Al-Mekki, 2000). In addition, Snouck Hugronje published a two-volume
book about Makkah in 1888 (that was translated into Arabic in 2012). Furthermore, many
historical landmarks within Makkah have been also mentioned in the geographic encyclopedia by
Yakoot Al-Hamoy in the early 1200s (Al-Hamoy 1977). The challenge is to convert these rich
texts into digital structured spatiotemporal information.
(a) A Simplified Sketch of Al-Estakhri
World Map
(b) The Turkish Empire Map
(b) Makkah detailed map By Burkhart
(d) Makkah before Islam as drawn by
Ayoub Sabry
Figure 2: Examples of Ancient Maps Showing Makkah
Building the Historical Geodatabase
Developing a GIS-based atlas for historical sites within Makkah is the first step in building a
HGIS for the city. The effort presents several technical challenges. The key issues are the
availability of spatial and attribute data and the linkage between past and present. Much effort
has been put into source data collection, including maps of different scales (some dated a few
centuries ago), aerial photos (for many decades), and satellite imageries. Attribute data
presenting textual descriptions about specific geographic locations in the past are also gathered.
Such attribute tables could be helpful in positioning some historical sites in modern geographic
coordinate systems. Additionally, historical attribute data, particularly historical textbooks,

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Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza, Gomaa M. Dawod, Ramaze A. Elzahrany, and Mohammad M. Mirza
Regional Conference on Surveying & Development
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 3-6 October 2015
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6
provide "recent or known" names of some old geographic locations (gazetteers). For instance,
Al-Hudaibia village in which the famous peace treaty was signed in year 628 is currently known
as Al-Shemesy. Figure 3 depicts the input data types to the spatiotemporal database. In the
current research study, the geographic experience (of the first author) played a vital role in
matching past and present names of historical sites, and required much field geographic
experience and historical knowledge. It is known that Makkah has been expanding rapidly in the
last two or three decades. Prior to that period many historical sites still existed though they were
known by different names. Thus, defining the geographic locations of historical landmarks
depends heavily on geographic experience acquired from field study before the rapid expansion
of the city.
Another technical challenge in building the HGIS is the georeferencing of some historical spatial
data. Some valuable old maps may be available but we do not know their spatial reference or
datum, thus they can only be georeferenced through spatial adjustment or rubber sheeting.
Scanned historical maps were systematically georeferenced, and spatial features digitized from
them in order to create vector GIS layers of the historical geodatabase. These were then used to
produce the atlas (Fig, 4).
Figure 3: Utilized Input Data Types Figure 4: Historical Geodatabase
Construction Process
Designing the Historical Atlas
The design of the historical geodatabase supported the development of the atlas as the first
product of this project. The atlas consists of two pages for each historical landmark. The first
page comprises the attribute data of a location in both Arabic and English, including: Name,
Type, Geographic location, Direction from holy Kaaba, Distance from holy Kaaba, Description,
and Historical remarks. Since the Kaaba is the center of the holy mosque (the most important
Islamic site in the world), the distances and directions of a specific site are measured from the

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Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza, Gomaa M. Dawod, Ramaze A. Elzahrany, and Mohammad M. Mirza
Regional Conference on Surveying & Development
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 3-6 October 2015
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7
Kaaba to show the location of the landmark with respect to this central object.. On the opposite
page of a historical landmark, its geographic location is presented on both map and satellite
images.
The resulting atlas of historical sites in Makkah city contains more than seventy locations. The
locations are grouped into nine types:
 Holy Kaaba
 History of the holy mosque
 Holy shrines
 Historical mosques
 Historical locations
 Historical mountains
 Historical events
 Ancient sites
 Pilgrimage and Omrah mikats
The first chapter of the atlas presents the main features existing within the holy mosque,
particularly the holy Kaaba, Ismail Hijr, and the Zamzam well. The second chapter depicts the
historical expansions of the holy mosque over almost fourteen centuries (Fig. 5). The area of the
holy mosque has been enlarged from 2061 square meters in the pre-Islamic period (the 5th
Georgian century) to 9844 square meters by year 710, and would be 1,225,000 square meters
after the completion of the undergoing expansion project. Such information could not be
represented well without HGIS. The third chapter includes five sites belonging to the holy
shrines in Makkah, while the forth chapter contains fifteen historical mosques. Another fifteen
sites, mostly related to the Prophet Muhammad, are depicted in the fifth chapter of the atlas. The
famous mountains, where famous historical events occurred, are presented in the sixth chapter.
The seventh chapter includes geographic locations of some famous historical events, i.e. battles
and peace treaties. The ancient sites, in the eighth chapter, contain some historical locations that
are not exactly related to the life time of Prophet Muhammad. An example of these ancient sites
is the dam constructed between 692 and 694 by Al-Hagag Al-Thakafy, the ruler of Makkah by
that time, to protect the city from flood water. The last chapter presents the geographic locations
of the so-called "mikats". From an Islamic point of view, a mikat is a geographic location from
which pilgrims declare "the intention" to start pilgrimage or Omrah before entering Makkah city.
There are 5 mikat locations surround Makkah from all directions. Examples of the published
atlas pages are presented in Figures 6 to 8 in the appendix.

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Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza, Gomaa M. Dawod, Ramaze A. Elzahrany, and Mohammad M. Mirza
Regional Conference on Surveying & Development
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 3-6 October 2015
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Figure 5: The historical expansions of the holy mosque
Creating the Online Historical GIS for Makkah on WorldMap
The demand in history and the humanities for searchable online maps, online mapping utilities,
historical GIS, and user participation in mapping data has been evident for at least a decade.
WorldMap (http://worldmap.harvard.edu) is an attempt to meet this demand. It is an open-
source, web-based, map-centric data exploration and visualization platform (Guan et al, 2012).
WorldMap is designed to be publicly accessible, simple to use for nontechnical scholars, fast in
search and mapping, and rich in geographic content. It is being built by and hosted by the Center
for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University and is open to users around the world for both
viewing and editing data (Lewis and Guan 2011). The platform is particularly useful for
technology-challenged humanities scholars for it lowers the cost of entry to the spatial
humanities. WorldMap eliminates the wasteful duplication of efforts for elementary and routine
spatial tasks such as finding a base map as locational reference or overlaying multiple layers of
spatial data and examining their locational relationships. In providing a working platform for
spatial investigation, WorldMap also grants a powerful new and permanent life to the spatial
research of any scholar in the world who shares their data using the system. Rather than resting
inertly and often forgotten on their computer’s hard drive once the research is published, the data
shared on WorldMap becomes part of a global online library of new evidence and analyses.
Through such a process, humanists are encouraged to follow the example of scientists in sharing
their data and the interpretive thinking upon which their work is founded. In putting the tools
developed by geographic information science in the service of the humanities, WorldMap makes
it possible for historians and humanities scholars to develop multiple and competing spatial
visualizations, to collaborate, and work cumulatively.
The historical geodatabase and historical atlas for Makkah lay a foundation for creating an online
historical GIS for the city of Makkah on WorldMap

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Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza, Gomaa M. Dawod, Ramaze A. Elzahrany, and Mohammad M. Mirza
Regional Conference on Surveying & Development
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 3-6 October 2015
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9
(http://worldmap.harvard.edu/makkahhistorical/). This online dynamic map combines modern-
day base maps with historical satellite images and aerial photos, historical topographic maps,
historical GIS data layers, historical photos, and modern-day social media streams such as geo-
tagged photos from Flickr, giving users the freedom to turn on or off any of these layers, zoom in
or out at any scale, “drill down” to any spot to find out more information behind the visible map
symbols, or even embed the interactive map in their own website such as personal blogs. As of
October 2013, this Makkah Historical Map contains two dozen GIS data layers, many of them
are first-hand datasets developed by the first author, such as wells in 1947, urban boundary in
1880 and 1947, building foot prints in 1880 and 1947, etc. . This is a living map that is being
edited and improved continuously, while viewable by the world (Fig. 6).
Figure 6: Makkah Historical Mapping on WorldMap
Conclusions
Historical GIS plays a primary role in connecting the history and geography of a particular
location by introducing time as the fourth coordinate. Since Makkah is the most important and
ancient city in the Islamic history, developing a HGIS for it is critically important for more than
a billion Muslims. A comprehensive geodatabase of historical data has been acquired, scanned,
digitized, and processed, including historical maps at different scales, aerial photos, and satellite
imagery. Attribute datasets have been collected and organized in a HGIS framework, thus
forming the first HGIS for Makkah. The first product of this HGIS is a bi-language atlas of
historical sites that contains more than seventy historical locations within Makkah. The time span
covered by this atlas is almost a thousand year (500s to 1500s). Work is underway to also build
an online HGIS on the WorldMap platform, so that materials in the atlas and beyond will be
made available for researchers and the general public from any part of the world through a web-
based dynamic mapping site. Future work may propel the system into an augmented reality
innovation.

__________________________________________________________________________________ 
Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza, Gomaa M. Dawod, Ramaze A. Elzahrany, and Mohammad M. Mirza
Regional Conference on Surveying & Development
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 3-6 October 2015
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10
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Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza, Gomaa M. Dawod, Ramaze A. Elzahrany, and Mohammad M. Mirza
Regional Conference on Surveying & Development
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 3-6 October 2015
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Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza, Gomaa M. Dawod, Ramaze A. Elzahrany, and Mohammad M. Mirza
Regional Conference on Surveying & Development
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 3-6 October 2015
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12
Appendix 1: Examples of the developed atlas pages
Figure A-1: Zamzam Well

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Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza, Gomaa M. Dawod, Ramaze A. Elzahrany, and Mohammad M. Mirza
Regional Conference on Surveying & Development
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 3-6 October 2015

13
Figure A-2: Mina Holy Shrine

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Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Meraj N. Mirza, Gomaa M. Dawod, Ramaze A. Elzahrany, and Mohammad M. Mirza
Regional Conference on Surveying & Development
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 3-6 October 2015

14
Figure A-3: Heraa Mountain and Cave