Early Geographical Dictionaries

T ODAY location of entities, and perhaps brief information about them, are relatively easy to find because of availability of gazetteers, dictionaries, atlases, and indexed maps. But before sixth century nothing comparable to a existed, and even after that such works were extremely slow to appear. By geographical dictionary is meant a work of reference in which names of entities are arranged alphabetically, with location and other information. Each entry, then, is a name, which may be defined as the proper name, or expression, by which a particular entity is known.' A distinction is made here between a and a gazetteer, though two terms are often used synonymously. The distinction is that expressed by Oxford English Dictionary, which in one sense defines a gazetteer as a index or dictionary. Mere indexes of names will not be considered

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