Download 1:50,000 scale topographic
 maps of the southern Levant

The image map below indexes 1:50,000 scale topographic maps of the southern Levant.  Map titles are displayed if you let the cursor hover over a grid square.   There are three sources for the maps, which are color coded on the index map.  Grid squares in pink are from the Soviet 1:50,000 scale maps; text is in Russian.  The one square in light blue comes from the U.S. Army K737 1:50,000 scale series, with English text.  The grids shown in green are the new Jordan 1:50,000 series in Arabic.  Where there was overlap between a Soviet map and one from Jordan I have chosen to use the entire Jordanian map and cropped the Soviet map, since the Jordanian maps are newer.  

The Jordan maps were scanned, cropped and georeferenced at the Natural Resources Authority of Jordan as part of a project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Center for Oriental Research, and the Department of Antiquities of Jordan.  The maps are part of the new JADIS database, and are made available so that the new JADIS Standalone Data Entry Program can be used to digitize project areas and display site points from exported JADIS database subsets or new sites created in a clone of the JADIS database.  There are 171, 15-minute sheets available.  

A word of warning about the maps.  All were originally scanned from paper copies.  Paper expands and contracts with temperature and humidity changes, and it does so at a different rate along the fiber grains as opposed to across the fiber grains.  Edge-matching under these conditions is never perfect, because the image displayed on the map is hardly ever perfectly true.  The edge-matching is pretty close, though.

Click on one of the grid squares on the map below to download the map from that area.  You will get a zip file containing three or four files:

• The scan of the entire map, with the marginalia intact.  These files are in .gif format, and are unprocessed. Some of them would need to be rotated slightly to rectify them, because they may not have gone through the sheetfed scanner perfectly straight.  They are included because of the legend and other information in the margins.
• The cropped and georeferenced images are in .jpg format to keep them small when they load in your GIS or the JADIS Standalone Data Entry Program.
• The files with the .jgw extension are the world files that accompany the cropped map images.  They must be placed in the same folder as the .jpg files for the GIS software to properly georeference the map when it loads.
• The files with the .rrd extension are the color pyramid files needed by ArcGIS (.rrd files are not included for the Soviet maps).  They allow zooming with less loss of detail than in the older ArcView and ArcInfo programs, and should also be placed in the same folder as the .jpg and .jgw files.  These files are not needed if you are using ArcView or the JADIS Standalone Data Entry Program.

The zip files vary in size from 4.5 megabytes to more than 27 megabytes, depending on how much topographic relief is on the map.

Other digital data for the southern Levant can be found by following these links:

• Nima 10m resolution, orthorectified, panchromatic SPOT Satellite images
• Digital Chart of the World data, at 1:1,000,000 scale
• LandSat 28m resolution 5 band false color satellite images
• True color LandSat 14.25m resolution satellite images are available from the GAIA Lab.  Press the "Landsat True Color" button on that page.