There’s now a search box in the Geocoding section of the site, which lets you search for place names (both ancient and modern) and should make this part of the site easier to navigate around: The Bible Book Browser (from 2007) also now has a touch-friendly interface: Obviously AI wrote these features for me. They’re [ ]
In the announcement for Opus 5, Anthropic demoed an interactive visualization of a car in a wind tunnel. Clearly the next logical question is: can Opus 5 build an interactive visualization of Herod’s Temple complex in Jerusalem during the time of Christ? Yes, it can. Try the interactive 3D model of Herod’s Temple it made [ ]
Experience the book here. In 1925, Gustaf Dalman collected 100 (actually 101) photos taken by the German Air Force in 1917 and 1918 into the book One Hundred German Aerial Photographs of Palestine. In addition to the photos, he also described what they depicted, and he cataloged the locations of over 1,200 similar photos taken [ ]
Go to the survey. This survey presents over 460 distinct Bible maps from 880 sources published since 1912 and includes a thumbnail of each one to help you identify the source of a printed map you might be looking at. The images are intentionally low-resolution; they’re not designed to substitute for the original but to [ ]
The 1985 Moody Atlas of Bible Lands by Barry J. Beitzel has a section at the end that discusses the history of biblical mapmaking. It concludes by showing a Landsat 1 image from January 1, 1973. Here’s my attempt at recreating the look of that image, alongside a more-modern take on the source data. The [ ]
In 1993, Richard Cleave (R. L. W. Cleave) wrote The Holy Land: A Unique Perspective, which to my knowledge (and as the book jacket says) represents the first time satellite imagery was directly used as a base layer for Bible maps. He writes that his source is a Landsat 5 image from January 18, 1987: [ ]
With last week’s release of Codex 5.3 and Opus 4.6, I had a new experience: an LLM showed itself to be a better programmer than I am. If you’ve seen my code, you may not think that’s a big achievement. But for the first time I saw, practically, how an AI could outperform me at [ ]
In 2018, I wrote about using terrain-generation software to make historical maps, with synthetic coloring to generate what look like satellite photos with modern features removed (cities, roads, agriculture, etc.). This post expands on the earlier one, creating synthetic satellite coloring at scale. When combined with the hillshading and vegetation techniques I discussed recently, it [ ]
Since 2015, three major hillshading advances have allowed for more attractive but still accurate and efficient-to-create maps than before: advances in data, surfaces, and lighting. (“Hillshading” means using shadow, light, and sometimes color to turn raw elevation data into something easily understandable by humans.) Data advances: 30m digital elevation models From 2003 through August…
Let’s say you want a high-resolution (1.2 meters per pixel) hillshade like this one of cliffs and hills to the west of the Dead Sea: 1:13,000 scale So that you can layer it over a satellite image (compare the original satellite image without hillshading added): Or maybe over an idealized landscape with human features removed: [ ]