Two Antiquities leaders by the map

This follows on "Ancient Roman environment" paragraph halfway down here: the blog post about the Roman road network ended up observing the vastly different water regime in ancient Mesopotamia. 

Update: I renamed the blogpost to add a second map of Marcus Aurelius along the Danube,

Alexander the Great in Mesopotamia

Fox News Digital ran a feature titled Alexander the Great's long-lost city located after nearly two millennia: ‘Absolutely stunning’ about Alexandria-on-the-Tigris (Charax Spasinou, summary at bottom). That falls smack dab in the middle of that map region. I simply recycled the previous map with Ancient World Mapping Center (AWMC) at UNC-Chapel Hill data for that period.

Charax Spasinou was originally founded as Alexandria (or Alexandria on the Tigris) by Alexander the Great in 324 BC, replacing a small Persian settlement called Durine. It was later rebuilt by Antiochus IV and briefly renamed Antiochia (or Antiochia in Susiana). 

Their metadata are here, as well as two archaeological reports here and here on the last decades' excavations: check out the stunning shallow geophysical mapping results for what may have been the largest port city of mid-first millennium BC. 

I sorted the Pleiades ancient place names database for features that mention Alexander (the Great) and found only two. Alexandria didn't show up, so I simply pulled the location and plotted it on the map.

click to enlarge, original here

You can clearly see why the port "then declined as the Tigris shifted and the Gulf shoreline migrated, leaving the port stranded" (summary below): the current shoreline today is way south of Alexandria then; that is the same with ports at the time of the Crusades on the French medieval coast of Provence.

Here are the previous maps from the prior blog that show the change in water regime mentioned atop:

click to enlarge, from blog post

Here is the News Summary in Perplexity AI.

Marcus Aurelius on the Danube

I created this poster for a local French group (Flickr), who asked where did he write his Meditations? It was known that he wrote them like a journal to himself - some title it "Pensées pour moi-même" not intended initially for publication - but what were the campaigns & circumstances? I simply asked Gemini in French and mapped this prompt/query / table:

click to enlarge, A4 original, table

The National Geographic background with no annotations show the Roman Empire. I added the Danube for reference. Here is the table in English, the map is self evident:

click to enlarge, original