Dated Place names

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1

Since Before/After/To/From dates all use the Limit Preference value, how do you prevent “?” substitutions for Places with name changes?

Specifically, how do I specify a modern name when the last name change happened longer ago than 50 years?

(I realize the boundaries are not equivalent in the following test case. But just wamted some sample data to try.)

  • Sumer (c.3500 BCE–c.2000 BCE)
  • Akkad (c.2334 BCE–c.2154 BCE)
  • Babylonia (c.1894 BCE–c.539 BCE)
  • Assyria (c.2500 BCE–c.609 BCE)
  • Seleucid Mesopotamia (c.312 BCE–c.63 BCE)
  • Parthia/Sasanian Empire (c.247 BCE–651 CE)
  • Al-Iraq (from c.7th century CE)
  • Ottoman Province of Iraq (1534–1918) “Wilayat al-Iraq”
  • Kingdom of Iraq (1921–1958)
  • Republic of Iraq (1958–present)
2

Date calculations in places use absolute ranges.

3

Okay. But how does one specify the “Republic of Iraq” example of “1958-present” ?

The After/To default limit is 50 years. So “After 1958” only covers 1958-2008.

And “from 1958 to today” is converted during entry into “from 1958 to 13 Aug 2025”.

So Events that are added from next month’s newspaper will be undefined for both of those.

4

For places, we use Date.match_exact() which does not use the date limits.

5

Does that mean the “?” placename substitutions that I see in the GUI is a bug?

6

The question mark (?) appears when there is no viable option in the Name and Alternative name fields based upon the date of the event.There is a gap in the date structure set up by the user.

7

Can you maybe specify how to reproduce the behavior?

I was only able to reproduce it by

  1. Add a place with a name with date range “after 1000”
  2. Add an event with no date and the created place
  3. Go to the events view: The place is ?
    This is probably because the event could lie before the range of the name (in my case before 1000).

I couldn’t reproduce it for events with a date (even if the date of the event is today).

8

Think of the event with no date displaying the event place as if the date was 1 Jan 0001.

If a place name never changed over time, just because it was “settled” or “founded” in the year 1000, does not necessitate the inclusion of “after 1000” in the date field. Any event, even the event with no date, would occur at that place with that name.

When there are changes in the place name, I will add the names with “from… to…” entries with the last name change “after…”. As the last entry in the alternative name list I will add one last entry with no date information. The name I would want displayed for that event with no date.

lexington
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