Ancient Perspectives: Maps and Their Place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and RomeAncient Perspectives encompasses a vast arc of space and time—Western Asia to North Africa and Europe from the third millennium BCE to the fifth century CE—to explore mapmaking and worldviews in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In each society, maps served as critical economic, political, and personal tools, but there was little consistency in how and why they were made. Much like today, maps in antiquity meant very different things to different people. Ancient Perspectives presents an ambitious, fresh overview of cartography and its uses. The seven chapters range from broad-based analyses of mapping in Mesopotamia and Egypt to a close focus on Ptolemy’s ideas for drawing a world map based on the theories of his Greek predecessors at Alexandria. The remarkable accuracy of Mesopotamian city-plans is revealed, as is the creation of maps by Romans to support the proud claim that their emperor’s rule was global in its reach. By probing the instruments and techniques of both Greek and Roman surveyors, one chapter seeks to uncover how their extraordinary planning of roads, aqueducts, and tunnels was achieved. Even though none of these civilizations devised the means to measure time or distance with precision, they still conceptualized their surroundings, natural and man-made, near and far, and felt the urge to record them by inventive means that this absorbing volume reinterprets and compares. |
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Contents
| 1 | |
| 9 | |
Ancient Egypts Multiple Maps David OConnor | 47 |
Greek Initiatives from Homer to Eratosthenes Georgia L Irby | 81 |
Mapmaking and the Scientific Enterprise Alexander Jones | 109 |
5 Greek and Roman Surveying and Surveying Instruments Michael Lewis | 129 |
Roman Mapping on the Grand Scale Richard J A Talbert | 163 |
Mapping in Roman Texts Benet Salway | 193 |
| 235 | |
Contributors | 251 |
| 253 | |
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Common terms and phrases
Africa alignment Almagest Anaximander ancient anticlockwise Antonine Itinerary aqueduct Asia astronomical Babylon Babylonian Beinlich bēru Çatal Hüyük catalog celestial century BCE context cosmos cubit cuneiform Deir el Medina depicted described detail dioptra distance earth east Egypt Egyptian empire Eratosthenes Eratosthenes’s Europe evidence example Fayum field figure fragments further geographic gradient Greek Harrell and Brown Hipparchus History of Cartography horizontal inscribed itineraries known land landscape Latin Libya lists map’s mapmaking marble plan Marinus Marinus’s measured Mediterranean Mesopotamia modern Moesia MUL.APIN names Nippur oikoumene orientation papyrus Peutinger map places provinces Ptolemy Ptolemy’s Ramesses Ramesses IV reconstruction record regions represent representation Reproduced with permission river roads Roman Rome Rome’s route scale Sobek stadia stars Strabo surveying surveyors surviving tablet Talbert temple terrestrial topographical tradition tunnel Turin papyrus map wadi Wadi Hammamat wall world map
Bibliographic information
| Title | Ancient Perspectives: Maps and Their Place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome The Kenneth Nebenzahl Jr. Lectures in the History of Cartography |
| Editor | Richard J. A. Talbert |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press, 2014 |
| ISBN | 0226789403, 9780226789408 |
| Length | 272 pages |
| Subjects | › › History / Ancient / Egypt History / Ancient / Greece History / Ancient / Rome History / Asia / Central Asia History / General Science / Earth Sciences / Geography Technology & Engineering / Cartography |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |