The Greeks
The Greeks offered theory to geography and cartography but also a pragmatic foundation following the previous knowledge of the civilisations to their South-East. The concepts of the spherical shape of the earth, the observations and measurements, the size of the spherical earth, the scale, the reference system used in positioning, the parametrised connection of the convex earth spherical surface with the concave celestial spherical surface, the orientation, the representation under projection on the plane, the scaled representation on a model-sphere, even the introduction of proper terminology together with the extension of criticism into geographic and cartographic reasoning, the concept of altases, the assignment of coordinates (i.e. pairs of numbers) to geographic features for their placement on a referenced spherical and/or plane surfaces, are some of the ideas the Greeks have introduced and developed from the 6th century BCE to the 2nd century CE. Two key personalities of this long Greek era of cartography are both representatives of its last period: Strabo and Ptolemy. From the first we learn what happened in the preceeding period since he is the only survived source of knowledge in cartography concerning persons and achievements before him and from the second we heired his monumental Geographia the text with which the Renaissance-World learned how to make maps with numbers, as it is made so far
Summary
The ancient historic presence of Greeks in the course of cartography is classified in the following periods:
- the Classic to Hellenistic period, 6th cent. BCE to 2nd cent. CE (Anaximander to Ptolemy; Miletus - Alexandria)
- the late Byzantine, late 13th to early 14th cent. (Planudes; Constantinople)
- the transfer to the West, early 15th cent. (Chrysoloras; Constantinople - Fiorenza)
Miletus to Alexandria
The long way of Ancient Greek cartography starts and ends in the periphery of the Greek world, if postulating as metropolis the land and sea around Athens: the kick-off was in Miletus by the disciples of Thales
Anaximandre is the man who started the seven-centuries-long way, followed by Hecataeus. The trip concluded with the apogee of Geographia the masterpiece by Ptolemy, written in Alexandria: a work which for the first time assigned numbers (digits) to the textual description of the earth's surface together with toponymy and thematic atributes to geographic places. With Ptolemy the representation of the earth, as shaped spherical by Aristotle and sized by Eratosthenes, transforms from textual to literaly digital!
Anemologion/the definition of the wind-directions: Aristotle's standard (left); Timosthenes' standard with the addition of geographical directions (right). After the introduction of the compass in the Mediterranean its combination with the anemologion improved navigation technology associated with the use of the portolan-maps on board
Intermediate period
In the intermediate period, between the Miletians and the hellenistic Alexandrians, featured and less knowledgeable milestones of thought, contributed in forming what it is considered today as the foundation of cartography which we follow and use so far. From Anaximandre to Ptolemy the list of names and achievements is long, as it is long the list of references on the issue, with most representative the volume on Greek cartography of the series of the foundamental editorial project on the History of Cartography edited by J. Brian Harley and David Woodward 1987, Vol. 1; Chicago: University Press
Marinus - the normal cylindrical projection |
Alexandria to Byzantium
After Ptolemy's Geographia, the work culminating the Greek cartographic thinking since Anaximandre, the now dominant medieval cartography is based on a new perception of the World and Cosmos shadowing the preceeding Greek reason and developing a different type of symbolic representation (here the term shadow has a schematic rather than an evaluative meaning) with some bright exceptions from the Arab contribution in cartography
The Greek presence in the field of cartography submerges, for historically obvious reasons, together with Ptolemy's Geographia which, although referenced in medieval texts (cf. P. Gautier Dalché), it is now evidently ignored in the cartographic representations since it does not belong to the dominant thinking of the period
Byzantium to Fiorenza
The Greek cartographic legacy comes back in the mid-late 13th cent. when Maximus Planudes, a scholar-monk at the Holy Saviour in Chora Monastery at Constantinople, "discovers" Ptolemy's Geographia under Andronicus II Palaeologus. The cartographic implementation of Geographia in Constantinople starts the long period of its enormous impact in the new cartographic thinking of the West for the coming centuries, especially after its transfer to Fiorenza/Florence and the translation of this Ptolemy's masterpiece into Latin (1409), under the supervision of the prominent Byzantine scholar Emmanouel Chrysoloras
Ptolemy's Geographia translated into Latin, Florence 1409, under the aegis of Emmanuel Chrysoloras
The expanded World
With Ptolemy's Geographia the known World of the Greeks since Anaximandre / Hecataeus and Eratosthenes is now expanded, always to the East, with almost 7,000 places defined on the surface of the spherical earth with their coordinates (longitude - latitude), their toponyms and the description of the geographic region they belong
The Ptolemy model will change only after the Great Discoveries in the second half of 15th cent.
A relevant book (in Greek): E. Livieratos 2008, 25 Centuries of Cartography and Maps. A tour from the Iones to Ptolemy and Rigas. Thessaloniki: Ziti Publishers, p. 263, 210x281 mm, ISBN 978-960-456-076-9. It is the second revised edition of the 1998 book with almost the same title. Contact: sales<at>ziti.gr; info | sample |