Geography (Ptolemy)

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Geography of Ptolemy in a c. 1411 Latin translation by Jacobus Angelus with 27 maps by Claus Swart.

The Geography (

Alfraganus – Ptolemy's work was subsequently highly influential on Medieval and Renaissance
Europe.

Manuscripts

Versions of Ptolemy's work in antiquity were probably proper

atlases
with attached maps, although some scholars believe that the references to maps in the text were later additions.

No

Andronicus II Palaeologus.[3] The three earliest surviving texts with maps are those from Constantinople (Istanbul) based on Planudes's work.[a]

The first Latin translation of these texts was made in 1406 or 1407 by Jacobus Angelus in Florence, Italy, under the name Geographia Claudii Ptolemaei.[12] It is not thought that his edition had maps,[13] although Manuel Chrysoloras had given Palla Strozzi a Greek copy of Planudes's maps in Florence in 1397.[14]

List of manuscripts
Repository and Collection Number Date Maps Image
Vatican Library, Vat. Gr. 191[15] 12th-13th century No extant maps
Copenhagen University Library, Fragmentum Fabricianum Graecum 23[15] 13th century Fragmentary; originally world and 26 regional
Vatican Library, Urbinas Graecus 82[15] 13th century World and 26 regional
Istanbul Sultan's Library, Seragliensis 57[15] 13th century World and 26 regional (poorly preserved)
Vatican Library, Vat. Gr. 177[15] 13th century No extant maps
Laurentian Library, Plut. 28.49[15] 14th century Originally world, 1 Europe, 2 Asia, 1 Africa, 63 regional (65 maps extant)
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gr. Supp. 119[15] 14th century No extant maps
Vatican Library, Vat. Gr. 178[15] 14th century No extant maps
British Library, Burney Gr. 111[15] 14th-15th century Maps derived from Florence, Pluto 28.49
Bodleian Library, 3376 (46)-Qu. Catal. i (Greek), Cod. Seld. 41[15] 15th century No extant maps
Vatican Library, Pal. Gr. 388[15] 15th century World and 63 regional No extant maps
Laurentian Library, Pluto 28.9 (and related manuscript 28.38)[15] 15th century No extant maps
Biblioteca Marciana, Gr. 516[15] 15th century Originally world and 26 regional (world map, 2 maps, and 2 half maps missing)
Vatican Library, Pal. Gr. 314[15] 15th century No extant maps; written by Michael Apostolios in Crete
British Library, Harley MS 3686 15th century
Huntington Library, Wilton Codex[16] 15th century One world, ten of Europe, four of Africa, and twelve of Asia, elegantly coloured and illuminated with burnished gold.

Contents

The Geography consists of three sections, divided among 8 books. Book I is a treatise on

atlas
of regional maps. The maps include a recapitulation of some of the values given earlier in the work, which were intended to be used as captions to clarify the map's contents and maintain their accuracy during copying.

Cartographical treatise

Maps based on scientific principles had been made in Europe since the time of Eratosthenes in the 3rd century BC. Ptolemy improved the treatment of map projections.[17] He provided instructions on how to create his maps in the first section of the work.

Gazetteer

The gazetteer section of Ptolemy's work provided

Prime Meridian, of 0 longitude, ran through the Fortunate Isles, the westernmost land recorded,[19] at around the position of El Hierro in the Canary Islands.[20] The maps spanned 180 degrees of longitude from the Fortunate Isles in the Atlantic to China
.

Ptolemy was aware that Europe knew only about a quarter of the globe.[citation needed]

Atlas

Ptolemy's work included a single large and less detailed world map and then separate and more detailed regional maps. The first Greek manuscripts compiled after Maximus Planudes's rediscovery of the text had as many as 64 regional maps.[b] The standard set in Western Europe came to be 26: 10 European maps, 4 African maps, and 12 Asian maps. As early as the 1420s, these canonical maps were complemented by extra-Ptolemaic regional maps depicting, e.g., Scandinavia.

Content

An outline of the encyclopedia follows,[22] with links to the appropriate Wikipedia article.

Book 1

Book 2

Chapter text
Chapter Region
Prologue
1 Britannia: Hibernia
2 Britannia: Albion
3 Hispanic Baetica
4 Hispanic Tarraconensis
5
Hispanic Lusitania
6 Aquitanian Gaul
7 Belgic Gaul
8
Belgic Gaul
9
Narbonensian Gaul
10 Greater Germania
11 Raetia and Vindelica
12 Noricum
13 Upper Pannonia
14 Lower Pannonia
15 Illyria or Liburnia and Dalmatia

Book 3

Chapter Region
1 Italy
2 Corsica
3 Sardinia
4 Sicily
5 Sarmatia
6 Tauric Peninsula
7
Iazyges Metanastae
8 Dacia
9 Upper Moesia
10 Lower Moesia
11
Peloponnesian Peninsula
12 Macedonia
13 Epirus
14 Achaia
15 Crete

Book 4

Chapter Region
1
Mauritania Tingitana
2
Mauritania Caesariensis
3 Numidia and Africa proper
4 Cyrenaica
5 Marmarica, which is properly called Libya, All of Egypt, both Lower and Upper
6 Libya Interior
7 Ethiopia below Egypt
8 Ethiopia in the interior below this

Book 5

Chapter Region
1 Bithynia and Pontus
2 Asia
3 Lycia
4 Pamphylia
5 Galatia
6 Cappadocia
7 Cilicia
8 Asiatic Sarmatia
9 Colchis
10 Iberia
11 Albania
12 Greater Armenia
13 Cyprus
14 Syria
15 Palestine
16 Arabia Petraea
17 Mesopotamia
18 Arabia Deserta
19 Babylonia

Image Gallery

History

Antiquity

The original treatise by

Augustodunum (Autun, France) in late Roman times.[23] Pappus, writing at Alexandria in the 4th century, produced a commentary on Ptolemy's Geography and used it as the basis of his (now lost) Chorography of the Ecumene.[24] Later imperial writers and mathematicians, however, seem to have restricted themselves to commenting on Ptolemy's text, rather than improving upon it; surviving records actually show decreasing fidelity to real position.[24] Nevertheless, Byzantine scholars continued these geographical traditions throughout the Medieval period.[25]

Whereas previous Greco-Roman geographers such as

Antonine-era Roman goods and not far from the region of Jiaozhi in northern Vietnam where ancient Chinese sources claim several Roman embassies first landed in the 2nd and 3rd centuries).[27][28][29][30]

Medieval Islam

See also:
Geography and cartography in medieval Islam
The Amir of Bani Bu Ali tribe, the likely Bliulaie of Ptolemy's map.

al-Masʿūdī around 956 as superior to the maps of Marinus and Ptolemy,[35] probably indicating that it was built along similar mathematical principles.[36]
It included 4530 cities and over 200 mountains.

Despite beginning to compile numerous gazetteers of places and coordinates indebted to Ptolemy,[37] Muslim scholars made almost no direct use of Ptolemy's principles in the maps which have survived.[31] Instead, they followed al-Khwārazmī's modifications and the orthogonal projection advocated by Suhrāb's early 10th-century treatise on the Marvels of the Seven Climes to the End of Habitation. Surviving maps from the medieval period were not done according to mathematical principles. The world map from the 11th-century Book of Curiosities is the earliest surviving map of the Muslim or Christian worlds to include a geographic coordinate system but the copyist seems to have not understood its purpose, starting it from the left using twice the intended scale and then (apparently realizing his mistake) giving up halfway through.[38] Its presence does strongly suggest the existence of earlier, now-lost maps which had been mathematically derived in the manner of Ptolemy,[33] al-Khwārazmi, or Suhrāb. There are surviving reports of such maps.[37]

Ptolemy's Geography was translated from Arabic into Latin at the court of King Roger II of Sicily in the 12th century AD.[39] However, no copy of that translation has survived.

Renaissance

Further information: Waldseemüller map, Sino-Roman relations, Indo-Roman relations, Europeans in Medieval China, and Chronology of European exploration of Asia

The Greek text of the Geography reached Florence from Constantinople in about 1400 and was translated into Latin by Jacobus Angelus of Scarperia around 1406.[12] The first printed edition with maps, published in 1477 in Bologna, was also the first printed book with engraved illustrations.[40][41] Many editions followed (more often using woodcut in the early days), some following traditional versions of the maps, and others updating them.[40] An edition printed at Ulm in 1482 was the first one printed north of the Alps. Also in 1482, Francesco Berlinghieri printed the first edition in vernacular Italian.

Edition printed in Ulm in 1482

Ptolemy had mapped the whole world from the Fortunatae Insulae (

Cattigara. On the 1489 map of the world by Henricus Martellus, which was based on Ptolemy's work, Asia terminated in its southeastern point in a cape, the Cape of Cattigara. Cattigara was understood by Ptolemy to be a port on the Sinus Magnus, or Great Gulf, the actual Gulf of Thailand, at eight and a half degrees north of the Equator, on the coast of Cambodia, which is where he located it in his Canon of Famous Cities. It was the easternmost port reached by shipping trading from the Graeco-Roman world to the lands of the Far East.[43]
In Ptolemy's later and better-known Geography, a scribal error was made and Cattigara was located at eight and a half degrees South of the Equator. On Ptolemaic maps, such as that of Martellus, Catigara was located on the easternmost shore of the Mare Indicum, 180 degrees East of the Cape St Vincent at, due to the scribal error, eight and a half degrees South of the Equator.[44]

Catigara is also shown at this location on Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 world map, which avowedly followed the tradition of Ptolemy. Ptolemy's information was thereby misinterpreted so that the coast of China, which should have been represented as part of the coast of eastern Asia, was falsely made to represent an eastern shore of the Indian Ocean. As a result, Ptolemy implied more land east of the 180th meridian and an ocean beyond.

Cipangu
(Japan). Cipangu and the mainland of Asia were thus placed only 90 and 120 degrees, respectively, west of the Canary Islands.

The Codex Seragliensis was used as the base of a new edition of the work in 2006.

TU Berlin, presented in publications in 2010[45] and 2012.[46][47]

Influence on Christopher Columbus

Cape St Vincent on the coast of Portugal to Cattigara on the peninsula of India Superior was 225 degrees, while according to Ptolemy the same distance was 180 degrees.[48]

Early modern Ottoman Empire

Prior to the 16th century, knowledge of geography in the

Mehmed II, who commissioned works from Byzantine scholar George Amiroutzes in 1465 and the Florentine humanist Francesco Berlinghieri in 1481.[49][50]

Longitudes error and Earth size

There are two related errors:[51]

  • Considering a sample of 80 cities amongst the 6345 listed by Ptolemy, those that are both identifiable and for which we can expect a better distance measurement since they were well known, there is a systematic overestimation of the longitude by a factor 1.428 with a high confidence (coefficient of determination r² = 0.9935). This error produces evident deformations in Ptolemy's world map most apparent for example in the profile of Italy, which is markedly stretched horizontally.
  • Ptolemy accepted that the known Ecumene spanned 180° of longitude, but instead of accepting Eratosthenes's estimate for the circumference of the Earth of 252,000 stadia, he shrinks it to 180,000 stadia, with a factor of 1.4 between the two figures.

This suggests Ptolemy rescaled his longitude data to fit with a figure of 180,000 stadia for the circumference of the Earth, which he described as a "general consensus".[51] Ptolemy rescaled experimentally obtained data in many of his works on geography, astrology, music, and optics.

Gallery

  • Codex Seragliensis GI 57, fol. 33v
    Codex Seragliensis GI 57, fol. 33v
  • Scandinavia in the Zamoyski Codex (c. 1467)
    Scandinavia in the
    Zamoyski Codex
    (c. 1467)
  • 1535 printed edition, title page
    1535 printed edition, title page
  • 19th-century print in Greek (3 volumes)
    19th-century print in Greek (3 volumes)
  • Prima Europe tabula One of the earliest surviving copies of Ptolemy's 2nd-century map of Great Britain and Ireland. 2nd edition, 1482.
    Prima Europe tabula One of the earliest surviving copies of Ptolemy's 2nd-century map of Great Britain and Ireland. 2nd edition, 1482.
  • Sebastian Munster, Tabula Sarmatiae, 1571
    Sebastian Munster, Tabula Sarmatiae, 1571
  • Sebastian Munster, Tabula Sarmatiae, 1571 (reverse)
    Sebastian Munster, Tabula Sarmatiae, 1571 (reverse)

See also

Notes

  1. ^ They are the Urbanas Graecus 82,[6] the Fragmentum Fabricianum Graecum 23,[7] and the Seragliensis 57.[8] The Urbanas Graecus is usually considered the oldest,[9][10] although some argue for the precedence of the Turkish manuscript.[11]
  2. ^ For example, the illustrations for British Library, Burney MS 111,[21] most of which were inserted into an earlier copy of the Geography during the early 15th century.

Citations

  1. ^ Berggren (2000).
  2. ^ Dilke (1987b), pp. 267–268.
  3. ^ a b c Dilke (1987b), p. 268.
  4. ^ Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [The Apostolic Vatican Library]. Vat. Gr. 177. Late 13th century
  5. ^ Milanesi (1996).
  6. ^ Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [The Apostolic Vatican Library]. Urbinas Graecus 82. Late 13th century
  7. ^ Universitetsbiblioteket [The University Library of Copenhagen]. Fragmentum Fabricianum Graecum 23. Late 13th century
  8. ^ The Sultan's Library in Istanbul. Codex Seragliensis GI 57. Late 13th century
  9. ^ Dilke (1987b), p. 269.
  10. ^ Diller (1940).
  11. ^ a b Stückelberger (2006).
  12. ^ a b Angelus (c. 1406).
  13. ^ Clemens (2008), p. 244.
  14. ISBN 978-0-8018-8589-1
    .
  15. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Oswald A. W. Dilke, "The Culmination of Greek Cartography in Ptolemy," in J. B. Harley and David Woodward, The History of Cartography, volume one. Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 177-200.
  16. ^ "Ptolemy, Geographia : cartographic material : manuscript". The Huntington Library. 1475. Retrieved 2022-09-07.
  17. ISBN 9780226767475
    .
  18. ^ Talbert, Richard (2017). Roman Portable Sundials: The Empire in Your Hand. Oxford University Press. pp. 119–123.
  19. ^ Wright (1923).
  20. ISBN 978-0-7503-1194-6
    .
  21. ^ Images from Burney MS 111 at Wikicommons.
  22. ^ Thayer, Bill. "Ptolemy: the Geography". Lacus Curtius. University of Chicago. Retrieved 13 April 2023.
  23. ^ "Ptolemy's World Map". www.bl.uk. Retrieved 2020-01-15.
  24. ^ a b Dilke (1987a), p. 234.
  25. ^ Codex Athous Vatopedinus 655: Add MS 19391, f 19v-20 (British Library, London)
  26. ^ a b Parker (2008), p. 118.
  27. ^ Young (2001), p. 29.
  28. ^ Mawer (2013), p. 38.
  29. ^ Suárez (1999), p. 90-92.
  30. ^ Yule (1915), p. 52.
  31. ^ a b Edson (2004), pp. 61–62.
  32. ^ a b c d Rapoport (2008), p. 128.
  33. ^ a b Rapoport (2008), p. 127.
  34. ^ Nallino (1939).
  35. ^ al-Masʿūdī 1894, 33.
  36. ^ Rapoport (2008), p. 130.
  37. ^ a b Rapoport (2008), p. 129.
  38. ^ Rapoport (2008), p. 126–127.
  39. ISBN 9789004347380
    .
  40. ^
    ISBN 978-0-300-06883-2
    .
  41. JSTOR 1792324
    .
  42. ISSN 1041-5440
    .
  43. ^ J.W. McCrindle, Ancient India as described by Ptolemy, London, Trubner, 1885, revised edition by Ramachandra Jain, New Delhi, Today & Tomorrow’s Printers & Publishers, 1974, p.204: “By the Great Gulf is meant the Gulf of Siam, together with the sea that stretches beyond it toward China”; Albert Herrmann, “Der Magnus Sinus und Cattigara nach Ptolemaeus”, Comptes Rendus du 15me Congrès International de Géographie, Amsterdam, 1938, Leiden, Brill, 1938, tome II, sect. IV, Géographie Historique et Histoire de la Géographie, pp.123-8.[1]
  44. ^ Paul Schnabel, „Die Entstehungsgeschichte des kartographischen Erdbildes des Klaudios Ptolemaios“, Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften, Bd.XIV, 1930, S.214-250, n.b. 239-243; cited in Albert Herrmann, “South-Eastern Asia on Ptolemy’s Map”, Research and Progress: Quarterly Review of German Science, vol.V, no.2, March–April 1939, pp.121-127, p.123.
  45. ISBN 978-3-534-23757-9
    .
  46. ISBN 978-3-534-24835-3
    .
  47. ISBN 978-3-8442-2809-0
    .
  48. ^ “Alberico”, vol.IV, c. 169, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Banco Rari 234; Sebastian Crino, "Schizzi cartografici inediti dei primi anni della scoperta dell' America", Rivista marittima, vol. LXIV, no.9, Supplemento, Novembre 1930, p.48, fig.18. Downloadable at: https://www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/Ren/Ren1/304.1.html Archived 2018-06-15 at the Wayback Machine
  49. ^ Casale, Giancarlo (2003). The Ottoman 'Discovery' of the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century: The Age of Exploration from an Islamic Perspective.
  50. ^ Brotton, Jerry. Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World. p. 101. Archived from the original on 2016-04-06.
  51. ^
    doi:10.2140/memocs.2013.1.67
    .

References

Further reading

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Geography (Ptolemy).

Primary sources

Greek
  • Klaudios Ptolemaios: Handbuch der Geographie, hrsg. von Alfred Stückelberger und Gerd Grasshoff (Basel: Schwabe, 2006)
Latin
  • (in Latin) La Cosmographie de Claude Ptolemée, Latin manuscript copied around 1411
  • (in Latin) Geography, digitized codex made in Italy between 1460 and 1477, translated to Latin by Jacobus Angelus at Somni. Also known as codex valentinus, it is the oldest manuscript of the codices with maps of Ptolemy with the donis projections.
  • (in Latin) "Cosmographia" / Claudius Ptolemaeus. Translated into Latin by Jacobus Angelus, and edited by Nicolaus Germanus. – Ulm : Lienhart Holle. – 1482. (In the National Library of Finland.)
  • (in Latin) Geographia Universalis, Basileae apud Henricum Petrum mense Martio anno M. D. XL. [of Basel, printed by Henricus Petrus in the month of March in the year 1540].
  • (in Latin) Geographia Cl. Ptolemaei Alexandrini, Venetiis : apud Vincentium Valgrisium, Venezia, 1562.
Italian
English

Secondary material

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