Ancient World Mapping Center

Exploring the Forma Urbis Romae Fragments: A New Approach

E. Wolfram Thill, IUPUI

       The scope and complexity of the Great Marble Map of Rome make it an unparalleled resource, but also complicate attempts to work with its immense volume of fragmentary data. Originally covering an area of over 2,500 square feet, it depicted the architectural footprint of every ground floor room in the city, from the Colosseum cavea to the interior of sprawling apartment structures. It has been recovered in around 1,200 known fragments, some subsequently lost. Making sense of this data would be difficult in the best of circumstances, but the logistics of dealing with the sheer mass of marble involved has drastically limited access to the map. Imagine a puzzle where you have an estimated 10-15% of the picture, broken into 1,200 mostly non-contiguous pieces, each of which weighs dozens of pounds in cut marble.

Various technological revolutions have improved access to the map. Drawings on vellum of select fragments were superseded by expensive but comprehensive printed-plate volumes. The internet and three-dimensional scanning opened new possibilities for documentation and access. Now we are launching a new undertaking: the Great Marble Map of Rome Project. This project will use newly available technology to take the next steps in research on this unique and invaluable artifact.

The Great Marble Map, or Forma Urbis Romae, or Severan Marble Plan (more on that in a second), has always presented particular challenges for access, challenges that have shaped scholarship. Up to this point scholars’ primary interest in the map has been to piece it together, and to identify and connect depicted buildings with structures known from the historical or archaeological records. These approaches tend to engage with the monument at the level of the fragment or individual depiction. To some extent this is a product of access, since it has been difficult to study more than a few fragments at a time. While topographic inquiries are certainly worthy pursuits, scholars have pointed out that such approaches downplay the original display context of the map. The majority of the depicted buildings are generic, unidentifiable structures that would have been difficult even to see, given that the original dimensions of the map were a staggering 18 x 13 meters, or around 60 x 43 feet.

The newest approaches to the Great Marble Map move beyond focus on individual buildings, to look at what can be learned from the plan as a whole. Such approaches require better access to both the fragments and their original context. It is here that the Great Marble Map of Rome Project has taken up the torch. The project is sponsored by the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in partnership with the Musei Capitolini and Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali in Rome. The mission of our project is to use new technology to achieve several goals. These are:

1)      To give wide and comprehensive virtual access to all aspects of the map

2)      To advance scholarship on the map and to take it in new directions

3)      To encourage public engagement with the Great Marble Map, particularly with regards to the actual fragments in Rome

Our primary means of achieving these goals will be a new website and online database that makes available three-dimensional scans of all 1,200 fragments and their original context.

Our first, inaugural enterprise for the project has been a photogrammetric scan of the wall on which the Great Marble Map was once mounted. The wall that now forms the north exterior face of the Basilica dei Santi Cosma e Damiano was originally an interior wall of a room within the Temple of Peace. Although the majority of the marble was robbed in the Middle Ages, pieces were excavated at the foot of the wall, confirming its association with the monument. The wall was divided into two zones, an upper section on which the map was mounted, and a tall socle below. The 150 or so marble slabs that once made up the map were fastened to the brick wall with metal clamps. The holes for many of these clamps are still preserved in the wall, despite modern interventions such as the insertion of windows. Since many marble fragments also preserve corresponding clamp marks on their back face, it should be possible, in theory, to align the clamp marks on the fragments with the clamp marks on the wall, reconstructing the original position and alignments of fragments. Previous attempts to do so, however, have been uncertain and slow, since they relied on working with the actual fragments and scale drawings of the wall. Three-dimensional models of all the fragments, however, were produced around 2002 by the Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project. What was needed was a corresponding model of the wall.

Our project’s solution has been to make a three-dimensional scan of the wall itself using Fan Photogrammetry. Generally speaking, this type of photogrammetry works much like a stereoscope. The process produces a series of overlapping but offset images that, viewed through the appropriate two-toned glasses, create a three-dimensional effect. Modern camera techniques and capabilities mean that this can be accomplished at an amazing level of detail over large areas and from considerable distances.

Mission Wall Scan was launched in May 2019, when a team traveled to Rome to take the necessary photographs for building the three-dimensional images of the wall. The research division of our team consisted of Dr. Richard Talbert of the Ancient World Mapping Center, Dr. Francesca De Caprariis of the Musei Capitolini, and myself from IUPUI. We were joined by a technical team from Queen’s University, Ontario led by Dr. George Bevan, assisted by Kristen Jones and Dr. Daryn Lehoux.

I am indebted for all technical descriptions of this process to Kristen Jones, who kindly provided more specific understanding than my “and then we took pictures of the wall.” The Queen’s University team employed a fan photogrammetry technique, shooting at seven Gigapan stations with their camera mounted to a fence along the sidewalk of the Via dei Fori Imperiali, approximately 50 meters away from the face of the wall. Scale was achieved using custom-coded scale bars, two in a right angle L configuration, and two more in windows across the wall. This allowed the team to imitate aerial-photographic mapping techniques. The Queen’s team shot 30 images at each of the seven stations using a telephoto lens with a 1.5 mm ground pixel size. To deal with the variable weather, Dr. Bevan and his team shot four sets of photographs over three days. This method allowed them to capture the part of the wall where the map was mounted. In order to capture the socle zone, primarily for conservation purposes, Dr. Bevan photographed the area by hand from a distance of 5 meters, shooting straight on for one set of photos and then upwards at a 45 degree angle to link the images with the larger dataset of the whole wall.

Our initial product is a three-dimensional record of the wall that once held the Great Marble Map. It is so precise that, despite being shot from 50 meters away, you can zoom in and see the textures of individual bricks. With the appropriate glasses, the effect is surreally three-dimensional. Given the right software, you can measure the space between holes and even the depths of the holes themselves within 1 mm of accuracy. In addition, Kristen Jones was able to use the merged high-resolution orthophoto to trace individual features of the wall using 3DM analyst and AutoCAD. Her end production is a series of precisely scaled drawings that highlight the clamp marks on the wall.

The next step will be to make these images of the wall available online as part of our new website. In the final presentation researchers will be able to directly compare the three-dimensional models of the fragments with the clamp marks on the wall scan. This should not only facilitate reconstruction and new joins among fragments, but will allow researchers to gain a clearer understanding of the physical setting of the Great Marble Map. What sort of distance, for example, separated various depicted structures? Are the sizes of inscriptions related to position on the wall? How is the work of different carvers distributed throughout the map and along the wall, and what does this suggest about the logistics of carving? These are just some of the questions we hope our new presentation can encourage and investigate.

The second initiative undertaken as part of our project is to further facilitate research on the Great Marble Map fragments. Because access to the fragments has been limited to a close circle of specialists mostly working with identifiable depictions, basic issues such as nomenclature and referencing systems have never been fully addressed. For example, there is no standardized system for referring to features represented on a given fragment. While this is not a problem when referencing structures such as the Colosseum, it becomes problematic when wanting to refer to, say, individual rooms around an unidentified peristyle. This will become more of an issue as scholars increasingly ask research questions that depend on generic, unidentified structures.

Even the name of the monument itself needed updating. Without going into too much detail here, we rejected anything pseudo-Latin, overly technical, or otherwise unintelligible to a broader public. Instead we decided to stick with the basics: the Great Marble Map of Rome. I therefore used this name for this presentation, in the belief that if you say it enough, you can induce others to use it too.

We are still working on a system for numbering the individual fragments and features, but as I will show, modern technology can make the presentation of a system much simpler. New software makes it easy to color-code and annotate three-dimensional models, rendering them more understandable for map experts, researchers new to the map, and the interested public. I am indebted here to my colleagues Jenny Johnson and especially Derek Miller at IUPUI Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship. With Derek’s help I was able to paint a pilot model using Mudbrick and to display the finished project via Sketchfab, without either process actually changing the underlying data. The original model shown here was produced as part of the Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project and is under the copyright of the Sovrintendenza. All models are to carry the Sovrintendenza’s watermark, but I am not yet sufficiently skilled to embed it (or to demonstrate familiarity with other tools).

What you see here is a section of the map currently known as 3ab. This section was drawn in the Renaissance as one large piece in a sketch now preserved in a Vatican Codex. Sometime later part of it was lost and replaced by a cast. Here is the newly painted model. I have marked inscriptions in red, commercial structures in yellow, columns in green, and arcades in blue. Crucially you can still manipulate the model, spinning it to check possible joins and clamp marks (this one doesn’t actually have clamp marks, so was a poor choice for my pilot model perhaps). One methodological problem that can arise when working with the Great Marble Map is that it is often not obvious to non-specialists what is actually extant. The next view of the model has the cast part dimmed to highlight the distinction between what is marble and original and what is not. This third view goes further, removing all markings from the cast to really emphasize what is actually preserved.

Sketchfab also opens up great potential for annotating models. Previously one of the challenges in creating a numbering system was a basic inability to display any such system in a legible form. Sketchfab can make presenting a numbering system less cumbersome. In this mock-up, I have added reference numbers to each feature. Feature 3.1 is an inscription, 3.2 the street, 3.3 the colonnaded courtyard, and 3.8 a commercial room. Crucially, you can toggle the annotations off and on as needed.

Another potential for annotation is to open the audience for the models. In the version shown here, I have annotated the model for the Roman specialist. The cast has the full reference number for the codex drawing, and the inscription has its official epigraphic transcription. In the next version, I have modified the annotations for the interested non-specialist, say an amateur historian. The cast annotation explains the history of the fragment, and the inscription annotation explains the transcription. My favorite possibility, however, is that the model can be annotated in order to develop curricula for students of various ages. In this version I have written the annotations for a grade-school audience. The cast annotation spells out the history more plainly, and the inscription annotation teaches vocabulary such as the term “inscription.”

We hope these new forms of presentation will help to uncover not only new physical, but also conceptual, links across fragments. In terms of physical joins, by clarifying what each puzzle piece represents, the color coding should make it simpler to see what we are searching for in a match. In this case, for example, we are looking for a commercial peristyle building along this edge, or more simply, a yellow and green building above a red inscription. In a more theoretical vein, this presentation holds great potential for researching into the representations of architecture. How are domus represented? What features of temples are emphasized? What can the depictions of public leisure parks tell us about how such spaces were conceptualized?

The most exciting aspect of the website, however, is that its ultimate goal is to facilitate work with the extant fragments themselves. Previously this would have been a vain hope, since the map fragments were inaccessible in storage. But there is a new, as yet unnamed, museum being prepared in Rome as part of the Musei Capitolini. The brainchild of Dr. Francesca De Caprariis, this museum will house all the map fragments in the Sovrintendenza’s care. Indeed, our team was privileged to see all of them in their new home during our work in May. Many fragments will be on display in a permanent exhibit dedicated to the Great Marble Map. The other fragments will be easily accessible for visiting researchers.

The location of the new museum has great potential to engage a wide public audience. Located in a former gymnasium for Mussolini’s Fascist Youth, the museum is within sight of the upper tiers of the Colosseum. An attached garden will house an epigraphy museum showcasing numerous architectural membra that were deposited there in the large-scale excavations of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. And a service building will eventually house the most important features of Roman culture, a gelateria and caffè.

The website will thus serve as an international gateway for the new museum. Scholars can develop hypotheses online, and then test them against the actual fragments in Rome. Study abroad groups planning to visit Rome can start a curriculum about the Great Marble Map in the classroom, and then continue it in the new museum and on the streets of Rome. For example, a student could prepare a presentation on the Colosseum fragments in the classroom, deliver it in the museum utilizing the actual fragments, and then continue the presentation at the Colosseum itself.

All of this is early days for our project. But our goals are in progress and achievable. We want to use new technology to make the Great Marble Map more accessible. We want to advance research and take it in new directions. And we want to achieve a wider audience beyond academia.

Less specifically as yet, we dream of making new scans of all the fragments, in particular to improve the underlying models and to speed their painting and annotation. Although at the cutting edge at the time, the Stanford scans reproduce only the basic outline of a fragment. They are also in a fossilized .ply format, meaning they must be individually converted to a more accessible .obj format and UV wrapped, a time-consuming and error-prone process. New laser scanning can quickly produce a paintable model that captures color and texture, as well as more precise contours.

In terms of public engagement, we want to develop an extended set of curricula that will allow students of all grades to engage with the Marble Map online, with the ultimate culmination being a visit to the museum in Rome. We want to develop an app that would allow tourists to take the Marble Map out with them into the streets of Rome and juxtapose it against the ancient monuments. We want to develop a virtual reality experience that would allow a viewer to walk around the reconstructed walls of buildings represented on the Marble Map. We want to maintain a database that is continually updated to represent advances in the field. We want to have a crowd-sourcing feature, where interested participants can work to find joins between fragments.

Not all of these dreams will be immediately attainable. But we are already bringing undergraduate students into our project through an IUPUI Digital Scholarship Fund. Graduate students in the Ancient World Mapping Center, as well as UNC’s School of Information Science, are ready to contribute too. We have the drive, we have the ideas, and we have a plan.

What Difference Has Digitization Made ?

Tom Elliott, New York University

It’s customary in talks about the digital classics to start the era with David Packard’s concordance to Livy, published in four printed volumes in 1968. This work — although deliberately unoriginal in its conception and delivery mechanism — nonetheless demonstrated conclusively that computational methods were both ready and appropriate even then to apply to philological research and reference work.

Packard’s Livy started after, but appeared before, another watershed achievement in philological computing: Roberto Busa‘s monumental Index Thomisticus. First conceptualized in the 1940s, and supported for years by IBM, this comprehensive lemmatization and concordance of the complete works of Thomas Aquinas was prepared using punch cards and published in 56 print volumes in the 1970s. A web-based version was published in 2005 and work continues to build on its foundations, employing treebanking and other modern methods of natural language processing.

       Classics has struggled over the subsequent half century to embrace computing in a way that evenly recognizes its practitioners as equal partners in scholarly endeavor. But despite this difficulty, there can be no denying that computing has changed the field irrevocably. Indeed, Marianne McDonald’s proposal for “the creation of a computerized databank of Greek Literature” closely followed Packard’s concordance in 1971, eventually bringing forth the earth-shaking Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (a project in which Packard and McDonald both played significant roles). The TLG is a uniquely pivotal work, resetting both expectations and methods field-wide, even though its full potential has been blocked by the aggressive enforcement of its restrictive license.

       But other flowers — increasingly varied in both beauty and function — have spread more freely across the intellectual landscape, products of both radical experimentation and patient gardening. Digital publications and research tools in epigraphy, numismatics, papyrology, philology, history, archaeology, and geography have proliferated (for a sampling, see the Digital Classicist Wiki and its list of Projects. And new ones — and new ways of using them — continue to emerge. The program for our present meeting illustrates this fact. Some naive word-searching turns up 35 unique abstracts that include terms like “digital,” “computer,” and “on line.” I’ll assert that the number of papers that depend on computation for data collection, record management and analysis is even higher, though the use of same has become so ubiquitous as not to merit mention in many an abstract.

       But if you want to come to close quarters with where classics has got to by way of digital methods in philology, and the places it might go from there, you must make plans to attend this afternoon’s session on “reconnecting the classics,” organized by the Digital Classics Association. The session features eight important voices in the digital classics, considering everything from the latest tools in computational philology to the challenges and opportunities presented by current crises in the undergraduate curriculum and classics praxis.

       Another session worthy of your attention has been organized by the Publications and Research Committee and scheduled for Sunday morning. It focuses on the Digital Latin Library, a joint initiative of the SCS, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Renaissance Society of America, that has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The five papers in this session will highlight the ways in which the DLL blends traditional Latin philology with new approaches from the field of digital humanities.

       Early digital philology and its progeny constitute but one of the paths that leads to digital geography in the classics. For a fuller picture, we have to reach back earlier, to the antecedents of computing itself. Ada Lovelace‘s 1843 diagram for the computation of Bernoulli numbers is considered by many to be the first published algorithm intended to run on a computer. The computer in question was the so-called analytical engine envisioned by Charles Babbage, Lovelace, and their collaborators. Although the machine was never built, and so Lovelace’s algorithm was never implemented, it is one of the earliest antecedents of everything that happens today on your phone, tablet, laptop, or other device that includes a microprocessor.

       It then took a hundred years or so, but by the mid 20th century, an explosion of computing innovation was imminent. The explosive had been compounded of such volatile ingredients as the enlightenment science that Babbage, Lovelace, and their contemporaries inherited; and the wealth imbalances, state actors, and corporate powers that had emerged from colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, the new imperialism, capitalism, and industrialization. To these were added other ingredients like the mechanized armies and industries that had been spawned by World War II and subsequently turned their attention and resources to a global Cold War of unprecedented technological complexity.

       Mathematicians like Dorothy Vaughan, Grace Hopper, and Margaret Hamilton were writing the first machine-language programs to calculate rocket and artillery trajectories; developing the first symbolic programming languages that would make software more versatile and maintainable; and coding the software that made it possible — 50 years ago this July — for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land on the moon and return safely to earth, thereby demonstrating (among other things) that the US had the technological and industrial capacity to deliver nuclear warheads anywhere on the earth with speed and precision. It was the space age, and the information age was swelling in its head, ready to leap forth into the fields of war and commerce.

       And into mapping for the classics, as it turns out.

       Let’s chart our return to the subject of this panel by way of our sibling discipline: geography. More specifically, let’s consider the gift that our metaphorical information-age Athena has bestowed upon that field, namely: Geographic Information Systems. The story starts in 1962 with Roger Tomlinson and the Canada Land Inventory. This project, overseen first by Canada’s Department of Forestry and Rural Development, and later by the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, compiled maps and other information indicating the capability of land to sustain agriculture, forestry, recreation and wildlife. Given the way I’ve characterized the development of the information age, you’re probably not surprised that I’d identify the modern nation state as the primary actor in GIS and that its focus would be land management and inventory of exploitable resources. This theme dominates the early decades of GIS and remote sensing, which saw the introduction of a series of open-source and commercial software packages built to serve the interests of the nation state and of private commerce. Key domains of interest included not only land use and natural resource management, but also census, navigation, military planning, utilities and infrastructure, emergency response, and city and regional planning. The passage of the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act of 1974 in the US added cultural resource management and archaeological impact assessment to the GIS menu, quickening its adoption as a standard tool in archaeological work.

       I’ve included on the slide you see the infamous “GIS Layer Cake” illustration. It will be familiar to those of you who have had occasion to learn GIS in a formal environment or to consult standard textbooks or help documentation. The illustration is here to help me point out one of the key legacies that GIS received from conventional cartography: the idea of layers. Richard Talbert has already mentioned the process whereby maps were composed photographically from layers of film. Most of these layers were thematic, dividing the map’s content into manageable groupings that required common visual treatments such as shaded relief, elevation tint, drainage line work, cultural symbology, labeling, and so on. Thematic layers made for intuitive data structures and associated interaction artifacts on-screen, and so they made their way into GIS. But GIS transcends its cartographic forebears in part by putting these layers to work for more than cartographic representation. The constitution of a map — its bounds, extent, projection, final scale, color scheme, labeling — can be deferred, revised, and iterated upon throughout a production or analysis project. Layers can be created by computation against the content of other layers and used solely as a data source or interstitial calculation result that never itself appears in the final map.

       But a final map is often not really the goal anymore. Most of the features provided by GI systems and most of the time spent working with them involves geospatial information management and spatial analysis, not cartographic production. That is, GIS is used to test hypotheses and answer research questions that are geographic in nature. Maps are incidental to the process: data visualizations well suited to human supervision of the analysis and illustration of its results. To be sure, the rhetorical power of an authoritative map remains strong when the goal is to convince others to adopt a course of action or accept an argument, but we should think of GIS as much more than a tool for map-making. Many other tasks that, in an earlier age, would have preceded map production – or that would have occurred afterwards in one or another use context – have been bundled up with the strictly cartographic functionality into a single software environment augmented with additional capabilities and complexities that would have been beyond the reach of pre-computational geographers.

What are we doing with all this? Geographic information systems have put unprecedented analytical capabilities in the hands of classicists. Geospatial information structures and their attendant computational methods let us analyze visibility of features in a landscape, interrogate cost surfaces to estimate travel times, construct networks of places mentioned in literary works, calculate Thiessen polygons to approximate the extents of linguistic or administrative regions, and more.

       We can also use GIS to create spatial datasets for use by others. Among the many achievements of the Ancient World Mapping Center in the 18 years since its founding is the creation of spatial datasets suitable for a variety of analytic and cartographic purposes. These datasets are being used by others not only because of their uniqueness and quality, but also because they are distributed free of charge under open license. We may get to hear a bit more about this shortly in Lindsay Holman’s paper.

       I would be remiss if I did not mention, in this of all sessions, that the AWMC owes this heritage of successful open-access publishing to the Society for Classical Studies. For, although we identified openness as a core value for the new Center, it was the SCS that granted permission for the reuse of the Classical Atlas Project’s compilation materials without charge for the benefit of the field.

       And so the SCS helped bring to life another of the AWMC’s data publications: the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places. I think that Lindsay will probably speak about Pleiades as well, but I hope she’ll forgive me if I say a few words about its design and about the current state of geospatial data work in ancient studies, which depends heavily on gazetteers like Pleiades. For a gazetteer is a thing that any mapmaker wants, whether working in analog or digital media.

       What is a gazetteer? Basically, it’s a geographic reference work: a big bucket full of reasonably consistent information about places. In traditional print, a gazetteer takes the form of a list of placenames, together with their known variants, associated spatial coordinates, and other distinctive attributes such as feature type (for example, city, temple, or forest). They have sometimes contained additional information, or even longer descriptive or historical narrative, blurring the lines with things we sometimes call almanacs or geographic dictionaries. At the simple end of the spectrum, they can serve as indexes into a map or group of maps. Such a bare-bones gazetteer appears at the back of the Barrington Atlas.

       The notion of a digital gazetteer solidified in the information science community of the 1980s and 90s. As the idea of digital libraries began to take shape, gazetteers were re-conceived as controlled vocabularies of placenames that could be used to facilitate activities such as automatic document linking, geoparsing of texts for named place references, and for regularization during data entry. The geospatial data included in digital gazetteers could be used to enable spatially aware search functions and to map arbitrary collections of content produced, for example, by a search engine. Influential pioneers in this area included Linda Hill and Ruth Mostern for the Alexandria Digital Library project at UC Santa Barbara, and David Smith and Greg Crane for the Perseus Digital Library project at Tufts University. Crucially, the complex spatial analysis and cartographic visualization capabilities of GI systems were not seen as components of a digital gazetteer. One might use GIS in the development and maintenance of a gazetteer. One might also load the contents of a gazetteer into one or more layers in a GIS to combine with other data for map-making or analysis. But the gazetteer itself was thought of as a database or dataset, together with a few computational services meant to support its use in another digital system.

       In deciding to take the Atlas Project’s information digital and on-line, we eventually concluded that this idea of a digital gazetteer better fit our data and our mental model than a GIS.

       One particular constraint of most GI systems was inimical to our data: the expectation that every feature of interest should have a well-defined spatial geometry (a point, line, or polygon). The limits of horizontal accuracy and the numerical precision of spatial coordinates can be codified in GIS (usually at the layer level), and even topological relationships with other features can be modeled, but features whose locations are wildly uncertain must nevertheless be represented with bounding boxes or representative points if they are to make an appearance in the GIS at all. The compilers and editors of the Classical Atlas Project reflected both the ancient sources and modern scholarship in giving us tons of such places. In the Barrington Atlas you’ll find them grouped in special sections labeled “Unlocated” in the Map-by-Map Directory volumes.

       Further considerations multiplied quickly. Many types and degrees of uncertainty obtained in our data. To take one example: how confident are we that a toponym appearing in an ancient witness is to be associated with a particular archaeological site or presumed locality? Richard and I enumerated such concerns in a paper that first appeared in 2002. It has now been reprinted in Richard’s “Challenges” book.

       We also envisioned a body of spatial information that might be under periodic revision at the individual place level. New archaeology, new texts, new analyses might all necessitate updates or corrections. Volunteer fieldwork with hand-held Global Positioning System receivers might contribute coordinates with more precision than the limited scale of the atlas maps had provided. New work with better satellite imagery might someday do the same. In this regard, our information-age Athena played more tricks on us. The chief agent of disruption this time was Google, whose relentless pursuit of on-line ad revenue led them to invest in the spatial aspects of digitally mediated commerce, giving away masses of map data and aerial and satellite imagery together with information about the locations of commercial entities and the way-finding services necessary to reach them. We’ve all paid for this apparent largesse, of course, by submitting our related behaviors to Google’s scrutiny, analysis, and monetization schemes. Another, less creepy, source of surprise was the OpenStreetMap community, which has dedicated itself to producing a user-created map of the world whose content is free and open by design. It has made a lot of progress, and Pleiades relies increasingly on their work.

       The gazetteer model has proved flexible enough to accommodate all these eventualities and more. Our commitment to openness complemented this flexibility by freeing us from the responsibility to reinvent and maintain GIS functionality on line for our users. If you want to do spatial analysis that involves Pleiades data, download the data and pull it into your GIS of choice. That’s what it’s there for.

       Identification as an open digital gazetteer also positioned Pleiades to play a leading role in reconfiguring the notion of digital gazetteers themselves. Pleiades serves not just one particular, curated digital library, but instead multiple arbitrary tools and publications distributed across the world-wide web and maintained by a variety of third parties. Providing the catalyst this time was Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, whose thoughts on stable identifiers and Linked Data influenced us significantly. I’ve spoken recently about Linked Open Data, scholarly digital publication, and the value of the computationally actionable citation that results. The text of that talk is on my website, so I won’t go into much detail here. Suffice it to say that scores of digital scholarly publications around the world are aligning the geographic aspects of their content to a growing number of general and specialized digital gazetteers that are also aligning themselves to each other. As a result, the probability is growing that the data a classical scholar assembles to begin or augment a particular study will already be collated along geographic lines. You won’t have to sort out whether the inscriptions cataloged in one dataset you downloaded are from the same Alexandria as those in another dataset. Both datasets will cite a relevant gazetteer entry, leaving the ambiguity of textual reference behind. This method is already expanding beyond geography to other facets of relevance like prosopographical identity, named time periods, calendrical dates, and cross-language technical terminology.

       If I’ve timed my talk right, I should be coming to the end of my 20 minutes. I’ll conclude with one more advertisement for another session. If you’d like to learn more about the difference that digital practice is making in classics scholarship, then on Sunday morning you should attend the session on “geospatial classics” organized by two other Mapping Center veterans: Gabriel Moss and Ryan Horne. Papers in this session will explore specific applications of geospatial techniques to the research and pedagogical challenges of the Classics. Every person presenting in this session is an innovative and thoughtful scholar whose paper should not be missed.

                                Richard Talbert, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

                                                Modern Mapping Before Digitization

     For most of the 150 years since APA was founded in 1869 it has been harder to make maps than many of us may imagine today in the era of satellites and digitization.  I say this not to find fault or make excuses, but to provide context for the somber truth that good maps for our work in the ancient field have been the exception rather than the norm unfortunately.

One basic obstacle faced by all mapmakers for the dissemination of their work until as recently as the mid-1990s was that the product really had to be a print one, normally on paper.  And, whatever the choice of production process, it was inevitably laborious and expensive; corrections and changes would be difficult to introduce, if not impossible.  Copper-plate engraving was thought to give a map the sharpest definition, and so until World War I this remained the process of choice for publishers seeking top quality, if they could swallow the high cost and be patient.  To engrave a large map would typically take two specialists several months, one for the linework, the other for the lettering.  As likely as not, any coloring required would then be added by hand.

Post-World War I, film-based photographic processes were developed and became standard.  While more streamlined, these also were laborious and expensive, and still involved manual work.  A map might well comprise, say, 40 different film-layers or ‘separations’ which, captured in a single shot, made up the completed sheet.  Landscape elevation was shaped by peeling and scribing, and typed place-names were gummed onto the relevant separation, even letter by letter in the case of, say, the spaced-out name of a wide region.  When work began in 1989 for what became the Barrington Atlas, this photographic process was still the only option, and it was used eventually for 43 of the 102 maps in the Atlas.  But in the course of the 1990s the mapmakers (Geosystems) were to abandon it completely.  The Barrington maps produced in this way would be their last; their photo lab was closed as soon as final corrections were made and these 43 maps dispatched to the printer early in 2000.

The decision was taken in the mid-1990s to produce the other 59 Barrington maps digitally.  I should stress what a risky, major shift this was on the part of all concerned.  For representing physical landscape, it relied heavily on the first edition (just released) of the U.S. Defense Mapping Agency’s Digital Chart of the World – a product that turned out to have plenty of defects.  A graver concern was that digital mapping, despite its impressive advances, was still a very fragile growth then, with nothing like the capacity or versatility that we take for granted today.  Around the same time Geosystems risked other forays into digital mapping: these proved premature, and led to heavy losses.  The great Historical Atlas of Canada project made four successive attempts to switch to digital production, the first three of which all failed and nearly sank the project.  Some over-confident ‘experts’ were prone to say that the Barrington ‘ought’ to have been a digital atlas, not a print one, and that its entire compilation and production ‘should have been’ computerized.  This is not a realistic claim, I’m afraid, unless work were to be suspended for several years.  For sure, map production in the early 1990s was less taxing than it had been before World War I, say; but still, the removal of the major obstacles – and with it the transformation of mapping potential that we’ll hear about in the next three papers – is a phenomenon of only the past 20 years or so, really post-Barrington.

By now you may be feeling that I’ve put the horse behind the cart.  Agreed.  To produce a map brings challenges, but first obviously you must gather items of relevant data and create from them the map you have in mind.  At any period before aerial photography (which began during World War I), let alone satellite imagery, achieving this goal presented challenges of its own.  Shorelines could be mapped with rather less difficulty than inland regions; this was because, for much of the Greek and Roman world that we study, the British Admiralty fortunately secured authorization, funds and equipment to conduct the required surveys during the first half of the 19^th century, and then published the charts that were compiled.

Mapping inland was liable to be a sterner proposition, however.  By the late 19^th century tools and instruments for measuring distance and height were available, certainly.  But to carry out the kind of triangulation survey needed to record an extensive landscape accurately was a slow, costly operation that really only the state itself could contemplate and was prone to regard as its exclusive responsibility.  Foreigners working independently were most unlikely to gain authorization to undertake it – and even a state’s own surveyors might well meet hostility from locals who shrewdly suspected that the aim was greater exploitation and control.

During the late 19^th century it was common enough for states in what had once been the Greek and Roman world to be stretched for funds, and to be facing pressures far more urgent than commissioning a survey; so this work was not done, or only in a very limited way such as surveying for the construction of railroads.  Even those classical scholars interested in actively mapping the Greek and Roman world did not think in terms making maps to show this ancient world exclusively as Barrington does, when there weren’t yet maps even of the contemporary landscape.  Rather, they set out to contribute to the mapping of that landscape, with particular attention to marking ancient settlements, monuments and other remains.  By the same token, these scholars did not share Barrington’s concern to return the landscape of their time back (where possible) to how it may have looked in antiquity.  As I say, even the contemporary landscape was yet to be grasped, and in any case there was no strong sense of it being different for the most part from that of antiquity (this is a post-World War II concern).

In these circumstances, therefore, the 24 remarkable maps of Attica at 1:25,000 produced for the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut by Johann Kaupert’s team of German military surveyors near the end of the 19^th century are exceptional – the work of foreigners in Greece, who had the state’s permission and external funding, and who focused on antiquity.  But of course the area covered was relatively limited.  Another exception was the surveys made by the (British) Palestine Exploration Fund from the 1860s.  Comparison of its results with those of the short-lived American Palestine Exploration Society in the 1870s underlines how exceptional.  The Americans had no theodolites and few other instruments, and so (explains a report to the British Fund in 1880): “The American maps are … valuable in giving general information concerning the roads, rivers and principal topographical features but they are not strictly accurate as to distances and smaller details”.  They amounted, said the report, to a “reconnaissance” rather than a “trigonometrical survey”. [F. Cobbins, Palestine Exploration Quarterly 137.1 (2005), 15]

For long frustrating, and over a vast area rich in classical antiquities, was the situation in Asia Minor, where the Ottoman authorities would not, and really could not, make a survey.  Small parties of foreigners might gain permission to explore and make observations, but this could prove tough work upcountry – with transport rudimentary, terrain punishing, and locals often unco-operative as well as speaking difficult languages.  By the late 19^th century the renowned German cartographer and classicist Heinrich Kiepert was at least bringing some informal co-ordination to Westerners’ piecemeal efforts in Asia Minor.  Several of these travelers commissioned him to create maps from sketches and notes they made en route.  Among them was the American classicist and epigrapher John Sitlington Sterrett, whose published record of journeys in 1884 and 1885 includes two maps by Kiepert for each journey.  As you see, there’s no mistaking their spotty character.  This is again evident in the 15 sheets of the Specialkarte which Kiepert published in 1890-91 as a synthesis of his knowledge about Western Asia Minor.  The widespread emptiness suggests that a scale as large as 1:250,000 was prematurely ambitious in fact.

The decisive idea to map the entire classical world specifically, and at a uniform scale, was not proposed till 1928 when the eccentric archaeologist at the British Ordnance Survey, Osbert Crawford, put it forward.  It was feasible by then in fact because, on the one hand, an international project to map the contemporary world uniformly at 1:1,000,000 scale was progressing well – the International Map of the World; and, on the other hand, its production method was the film-based photographic one.  So, Crawford realized, in order to map the entire Roman Empire (as he dared to propose), which covers about 50 IMW sheets, you could cherry-pick the separations: discard all those showing modern settlement, railroads, etc; retain the ones for physical features; and then create new separations for marking Roman settlements, roads, limites, etc.  This project, headed by Crawford and sponsored by the International Geographical Union, came to be called Tabula Imperii Romani.

A brilliant scheme in principle.  But how feasible was it in practice ?  Well, there was initial enthusiasm to draft provisional sheets – shown particularly in Italy, also in France and Spain, as well as by the British Survey in Egypt and the Ordnance Survey itself.  But Crawford struggled in vain to gain agreement on just what features were to be mapped and in what styles, and he had no power of editorial control; he also had no funds to bestow or withhold.  World War II halted progress, and Crawford retired; then there had to be a fresh start.  When it eventually came, in the mid-1950s, sponsorship switched to the International Union of Academies.  This was a boost, but the Union too offered no funds, and increasingly progress was stalled by its insistence (understandably enough) that the mapping for a country could only be done by that country.  For one reason or other, some countries showed no interest and weren’t even Union members – including Turkey, with its territory straddling as many as eight IMW sheets.  In several other instances, where an IMW sheet includes territory of two countries or more (as often), neighbors refused to collaborate; so either the sheet wasn’t made, or one country just went ahead leaving the other’s territory blank !

Meantime, with TIR still notionally progressing but in fact almost at a standstill, there was no comparable mapping of core areas of the classical world being commissioned otherwise.  So right up till 2000 in fact, when the Barrington Atlas appeared, the ‘best’ (in inverted commas) maps of ancient Greece or Italy or Spain or France were mostly still ones (seldom large-scale) made by Heinrich Kiepert or his son Richard before World War I, either for fascicles of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum or for an atlas (never completed) Formae Orbis Antiqui – all rare items of course, hard to find let alone to acquire, and very, very out of date.

APA/SCS deserves full credit for recognizing this jam and initiating steps to break it.  In 1980 an APA ad hoc committee formed to review basic research tools for the ancient field, and to recommend how APA might assist in improving them, dared to describe the state of tools for cartography as “utterly disastrous”.  Its report went on: “A concerted attempt to produce a uniform series of maps which show both the topography – with all the sophistication of modern cartography – and the ancient toponyms – with the accumulated knowledge of classical scholarship – would be immensely valuable.” [R. S. Bagnall (ed.), Research Tools for the Classics (Chico, 1980), 27]

Action soon followed with the formation of an APA Classical Atlas board; but do not imagine that a smooth path then leads directly to the appearance of Barrington 20 years later.  Alas no, because first this board struggled for a long time – as Crawford had done – over just what should be mapped and how, by whom, to what schedule, and (as always !) where the funding would come from.  At the end of 1987, with still nothing agreed or achieved and no funds raised, the board resolved to start afresh and it invited me to become project director – in part no doubt because far away in the U.K., with the help of 25 colleagues, I had produced a modest textbook classical atlas on a shoestring budget.  But I had only moved across the Atlantic in 1985 (to Canada), and I was barely even aware of APA’s far more ambitious project.  My chances of turning it into a success seemed slim to none, so I realized how crazy it would be to accept the invitation.  Yet this was clearly an opportunity with exciting potential to be unlocked somehow, and I fell for the bait.

You can find records of how this bleak zero-point gradually led to the Barrington Atlas and its Map-by-Map Directory published by Princeton in 2000, if you dip into my new book Challenges of Mapping the Classical World (Routledge).  Much in these records was written – please understand ! – with an eye to funders and to maintaining their confidence, so naturally accomplishments and progress are highlighted, with much less on details or on setbacks, failures and crises, of which there were plenty throughout, believe me.  I am painfully aware that the principles I adopted, and the choices I proceeded to make about what should be mapped and how, by whom and to what schedule, were by no means the only possible options, let alone the only ones worth pursuing.  But I would still maintain that they offered the most useful and viable way forward in the dire circumstances at the time, and that Barrington retains long-term value, as was always the hope.

The plan, in essence, was for a large-format bound atlas (not sheet maps) to be created in close partnership from the outset with a professional map producer and a leading publisher, for completion within a decade (energy wouldn’t last longer); its scope to be the entire classical world post-Bronze Age to Late Antiquity, but ‘only’ (ha, ha) the physical and cultural landscape (no modern features or thematic maps or city-plans); apart from overviews, at really just two scales – 1:500,000 for the core, 1:1,000,000 for the periphery, using separations from the American and British aeronautical charts that superseded the IMW; map compilation to be by 70 or more top regional experts worldwide, who would be paid and obliged to follow the editor’s instructions, as well as to document everything briefly for the Directory, and submit to peer review; the design would deliver clear, visually appealing color maps, accessible to non-specialists; and the atlas list price would be within a range that private buyers could at least consider.

In retrospect now, Barrington as produced in accordance with this plan has patent limitations, to be sure.  In particular, it is not georeferenced, and no map’s coverage can be greater than a doublespread obviously; so there are constant page-breaks, and seamlessness isn’t an option.  As to content, it’s also not ideal to include everything from the Archaic period to Late Antiquity on just a single map.  Ideally, a region should have a suite of maps for successive periods; but then think how costs would balloon, along with Barrington’s bulk and price !   The fact is that this limitation and others derive from obstacles imposed by the production process in the pre-digital era, as already explained.  Barrington’s timing, however, turned out to be uniquely fortunate, because advances in digitization quickly made it possible to start overcoming these obstacles and do much more – which leads to the next paper by Tom Elliott.  Thanks in the first instance to APA’s lead, and then not least to international teamwork generously funded, the state of cartography in the ancient field has now been transformed from “utterly disastrous”.

Greek and Roman Mapping

Georgia L Irby

College of William and Mary

In 1857 Harvard Professor of History Henry Torrey bemoaned the school’s dormant map collection: “History,” he said, “cannot be read to advantage without geographical apparatus and particularly good maps.” Maps have always been essential tools for the historian and political scientist, as we see in Strabo’s observation that such documents are useful to governors who can manage affairs better if they know the size of a country, lay of the land, and the peculiarities of sky and soil (Strabo 2.5.8).

Early modern initiatives in Classical cartography and geography parallel the scope and aims of the ancient disciplines, which were themselves a rich intellectual cocktail. The same questions were posed by scholars in Antiquity and of the Enlightenment. What is geography? Is it a “mixed” mathematical topic intersecting with natural philosophy, astronomy, cartography, and geology (as in Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy)? Or is it the humanizing and humanistic oculus of history (as we see in Herodotus)? Or a political, military, and economic tool? (as in Strabo and Caesar) What are the aims of geography and cartography? To describe the physical earth or to elucidate the peoples on it? For what purposes do we study ancient cartography? For political and philosophical principles in order to establish “usable models” (as in the colonial Americas) or to elevate the taste of elite youth (as for the Society of the Dilettanti in 18th century England)? Like the ancients (especially Strabo who repressed scientific for human geography: 1.3.12), the moderns were concerned with enlivening the inherent tedium of “the dryness of geographical detail” by connecting it to more “agreeable” subjects, such as history, “which,” according to James Rennell, a founder of the Royal Geographic Society in 1830 (and, incidentally, the “father of oceanography”), “is the proper office of geography to explain.”

Today we have two aims: first, to survey the limitations of surviving evidence for maps as a form of record and communication in Greek and Roman culture, and second, to reflect on the evolution of more recent approaches to this material from the founding of the American Philological Association.

To begin at the beginning. Did the Greeks and Romans have and use maps as we understand them? A great deal of evidence suggests yes. Cartographic curiosity was widespread, as anyone who has read Herodotus or Thucydides, or Aeschylus or Vergil knows full well. And this evidence, when properly contextualized, helps to demonstrate how the ancient Mediterranean people understood the value and limitations of maps.

It had long been accepted that the earth was spherical, and in the second century bce, Crates of Mallos (ca 150 bce) produced a terrestrial globe to illustrate Odysseus’ travels. Crates’ globe was described and approved by Strabo (2.5.10), whose Geography is one of our richest sources for ancient cartography, as a more realistic rendering of the world since the globe, like the earth, is spherical. Ptolemy, like his predecessors, knew that the shape of the world would affect the deployment of a map, and thus, in the second century ce, he aimed to solve the problem of projecting a three-dimensional earth onto a two dimensional grid, where cartographic data quickly become distorted. Ptolemy also defined the art of cartography as “an imitation through drafting of the entire known world together with the things that are, broadly speaking, connected with it” (Geography 1.1.1). Ptolemy’s cartographic project was far from the first. It was, in fact, the culmination of cartographic inquiry that began with Homer (Strabo called Homer the “father of geography:” 1.1.11).

That a variety of maps were made and used in a range of contexts is not in doubt. These maps could be graphic or textual. In his will, Theophrastus requested that a physical world-map painted on wooden panels be displayed at the Lyceum (Diogenes Laërtius 5.51). And Apollonius of Rhodes refers to maps displayed on pillars in Aeëtes’ court at Colchis, “on which are all the roads and paths of the sea and land flowing all around” (Argonautica 4.729–781). In book three of the Aeneid, Vergil presents, essentially, a textual map (coasting guide or periplus) of the Mediterranean Sea. Maps could also be practical or symbolic. A cadastral mine plan, for example, survives from Thorikus east of Attica, etched above the entrance to silver mine #3 (Dilke 1985, 26). But the world map commissioned by Julius Caesar was intended as a symbolic show of Roman hegemony over the Mediterranean world in the first century bce. Caesar’s project was completed decades later by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, and it was prominently displayed in marble on the walls of the Portico of Vipsania, near the Ara Pacis. The Marble City plan (for which, see Professor Thill’s paper) was commissioned by Septimius Severus possibly to demonstrate the recovery of city and empire after a tumultuous period of civil war (Reynolds, 1997, 124–134).

The actual maps, however, rarely survive, and maps were almost never included in the manuscripts that have come down to us. But authors may have drawn maps to accompany their geographical tracts. Strabo praised Eudoxus for his skill in rendering figures. Thus, geometrically informed sketches may have accompanied his Circuit of the Earth (Dilke 1985, 26–27). And Eudoxus’ contemporary, the historian Ephorus of Cyme (405–330 bce), illustrated his arguments “with the help of the enclosed drawings” (see Dilke 1985, 27).

The first map of the Greek world is ascribed to Anaximander who may have drawn it to accompany his own Circuit of the Earth (sixth century bce). The terrestrial map may have been little more than an outline of the earth and sea, drawn on a painted pinax or bronze tablet (Diogenes Laërtius 2.1–2; Dilke 1985, 23). And we can only speculate on its details. We do not know the relative sizes of the land masses (were they equal?). Nor can we reconstruct the map’s center (Delphi, Delos, or Miletus, probably). Scholars also dispute the shape of Anaximander’s oikoumenē (was it a circle, a parallelogram, or a parallelogram inscribed within a circle?).

Nonetheless, the art of cartography flourished at Miletus and within half a century or so, as Greek trade and settlement expanded, accruing cartographical detail allowed Hecataeus of Miletus to produce a map that was “more accurate so that it became a source of wonder” (Agathemerus 1.1, third-fourth century; DK A6).

Map as artefacts quickly came to have political resonance. Herodotus painstakingly described a map owned by Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus during the mounting tensions between the Greeks and Persians (5.36). In 499/98 bce, Aristagoras toured the Greek mainland aiming to secure allies against Darius I (Herodotus 5.36, 126). As a visual aid to persuade potential allies of the imminent danger of the Persian empire, Aristagoras employed a portable map which showed the lands between Laconia, Ionia, and Persia. As was typical, the map lacked any measurable scale. And when the Spartan king Cleomenes inquired about the length of the march between Sparta and Asia, Aristagoras replied “three months,” an ambiguous though standard length of measurement. Cleomenes did not deem the threat sufficiently imminent, and he eschewed the alliance.

Large‐scale maps were known at least by the fifth century. And they continued to serve as visual aids. Socrates used a map on public display in Athens to try to teach humility to Alcibiades who bragged about his own immense wealth and estates (Aelian, Historical Miscellany 3.28). Socrates first asked the statesman to find Attica, easy enough, and then his own fields, which, Alcibiades noted, were not on the map. Socrates then admonished his friend that he had no right to boast of estates “which are not even part of the earth.” Thus the Greeks understood the capacity of maps as instruments of persuasion and as analogies of political and social authority.

In Aristophanes’ Clouds 200–218, first produced in 423 bce during the Peloponnesian War, Strepsiades, an everyman Athenian farmer, toured Socrates’ “think-tank,” the so-called Phrontisterion, where a comically exaggerated Socrates lectured and where a map of the Greek world was displayed (likely inspired by the world map used by the historical Socrates in our previous anecdote). The map included Athens, Strepsiades’ deme, and even Euboea. When Strepsiades asked about the location of Sparta, he became alarmed at its proximity to Attica, and vehemently demanded that his student-guide move the enemy polis further away. Here, a map serves as an effective focal point of contemporary political anxieties.

The artefacts rarely survive, and those that do are liable to be far from complete, such as the Severan Marble Plan. Also, the fragmentary and poorly preserved Papyrus of Artemidorus of Ephesus’ Geography (the so-called Artemidorus Papyrus) seems to have been repurposed as an artist’s exercise book, with sketches of gods, humans, animals, and body parts. In addition to some text on the Iberian peninsula, the papyrus preserves an incomplete geographical map (Kramer 2001, 115) which renders a landscape and about 40% of the Iberian settlements including complex vignettes of larger settlements and several isolated solid rectangles that might indicate Roman way-stations, mansiones (Kramer 2001, 118). If the papyrus is authentic and its text and map are genuine—Canfora (2006) argues that it is a nineteenth‐century forgery—the Artemidorus map would then be the only regional Roman provincial map that has come down to us, apart from the Dura‐Europus parchment shield-cover (45 × 18 cm = 17.7 × 7˝), datable to just before 260 ce.

We now turn to the scholars who catalogued, translated, contextualized, and interpreted this large body of knowledge. Until the 1980s modern understanding of ancient cartography was fragmentary, poorly balanced, and largely extrapolated, for example, from medieval interpretations of Ptolemy. In English, groundwork was laid by several men whose scholarship reflected their times, offering two-dimensional interpretations of the texts in light of the accepted political and social superiority of Greco-Roman culture, and focusing largely on “accuracy,” history, and politics, but showing little sensitivity to the nuanced, underlying themes inherent in the primary sources. E. H. Bunbury’s History of Ancient Geography (1879) was an important first step. Bunbury recognized the rich tradition of geographical texts in antiquity and also the lack of a systematic overview in English (the topic had been tackled in German by Ukert as early as in 1816). In two meaty volumes, Bunbury worked chronologically to tease out Greco-Roman geographical knowledge, a paradigm that was followed by Tozer (1897) and Thompson (1948). In 1934, E. H. Warmington helpfully marshalled primary evidence (in English) in his Greek Geography, noting the interstices of geography and cartography with many disciplines including cosmology, climatology, mathematics, and politics. By the 1950s, the primary sources received deeper scrutiny from the distinguished paleographer and textual historian Aubrey Diller whose Tradition of the Minor Greek Geographers was published by APA. With an exhaustive survey of the manuscripts and a fifty-plus page bibliography, Diller produced a much-improved and more complete edition that took into account manuscript variants and texts unknown to Karl Müller, editor of the same corpus in the 1850s. Diller’s prolegomena and commentaries on the Periplus of the Euxine Sea, Menippus, and pseudo-Scymnus remain useful.

A more open, culturally sensitive renaissance in cartography was begun by Brian Harley and David Woodward with their monumental History of Cartography (six volumes, eight tomes; the University of Chicago Press has made the first three volumes available online: https://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/index.html ). The first volume (1987) included an expanded version of O. A. W. Dilke’s Greek and Roman Maps (1985), which scrutinized wide-ranging evidence for ‘maps’ in a variety of contexts and sources. Thus were opened the floodgates to interpret the material within contemporary contexts and as sources that had profound potential “to advance understanding of past societies” (I quote from the introduction of Richard Talbert’s Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods, edited with Richard Unger, 2008, p. 2).

With this ‘turn’ since the 1980s, the very notion of what should be meant by a ‘map’ has shifted. Scholars are no longer (unprofitably) obsessed with the perceived “accuracy” or “comprehensivity” of ancient cartographic accounts. Research now focuses on conceptual and theoretical frameworks. As we have already seen, ancient cartography was a variegated tapestry of many intellectual threads, as shown in a number of recent surveys, handbooks, and companion volumes. In her slim Geography in Classical Antiquity (2012), Daniella Dueck approaches the material thematically with a focus on the primary trajectories of ancient Mediterranean geography: the widely accessible (and not necessarily fictive) ambit of descriptive geography; scientific and mathematical geography; and the cartographic or visual aspects (in a chapter by Kai Brodersen). Duane Roller’s 2015 survey Ancient Geography: The Discovery of the World in Classical Greece and Rome elicits the sense of wonder, excitement, and adventure that permeated Greco-Roman exploration and cartographic initiatives.

In the Routledge Companion to Strabo, edited by Daniela Dueck (2017), the trajectories of investigation include the ramifications of Strabo’s Stoicism (Myrto Hatzimichali), his literary style (Sarah Pothecary), and his approaches to ethnography and identity (Edward Dandrow). The topic of ethnography and identity is explored more fully in the 2016 Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds edited by Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Molly Jones-Lewis. Seven articles are categorized under the rubric of “Mapping ethnicity” that treat topics such as location and dislocation in early geography (Philip Kaplan), autochthony (Jacquelyn Clements), and astronomy as a cartographic principle in Ptolemy’s treatment of Arabia Felix (Joanna Komorowska).

Returning to Strabo’s Geography, in the wake of Stefan Radt’s German translation (2002-2011), Duane Roller’s 2014 page-turning translation and 2018 commentary are the first in English since Horace Leonard Jones’ seven volume Loeb set (1917-1932). Needless to say, Roller’s work brings Strabo into the twenty-first century, making him accessible to a new generation. Other fundamental writers have also received fresh translations and commentaries (Duane Roller on Eratosthenes: 2010; J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones on Ptolemy: 2000). Further editions are in the pipeline under the auspices of the “Translated Texts from Antiquity” Series which is being spearheaded by Colin Adams at the University of Liverpool. These will include editions of Hanno and Avienus (Duane Roller) and a new translation and commentary of Pomponius Mela (by me, hopefully), which will update the European commentaries of the 1970s and 1980s [Italian (Parroni: 1984), French (Silberman: 1988), Spanish (Guzmán Arias: 1989), German (Graz: 1969), Swedish (Ranstrand: 1971)] and provide deeper analysis than the scant scholia in Romer’s 1998 translation of Mela.

New approaches are, moreover, brought to bear on understanding the frame, internal structure, shape, and size of the Greco-Roman oikoumenē. And new avenues are being interrogated for cartographic knowledge. Edited by Klaus Geus and Michael Rathmann (2013), Vermessung der Oikumenē presents nineteen articles that explore diverse and often fragmentary sources of cartographic knowledge, from coasting guides, infrastructure (Klaus Grewe on aqueducts), to military diplomata (Richard Talbert). Political and historical conceptions of space are probed in Katherine Clarke’s Between Geography and History: Hellenistic Constructions of the Roman World (1999). Also of note is the symbolic resonance of monumental maps, such as the Peutinger Map, the Severan Marble Plan, and the Arabic Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes (see Talbert and Unger 2008). In the 2016 Brill’s Companion to Ancient Geography Pietro Janni explores water-ways, including the Mediterranean Sea, the outer oceans, and rivers as cartographic principles [“The Sea of the Greeks and Romans”]; and Veronica Bucciantini tackles riverine expeditions [“Geographical Description and Historical Narrative in the Tradition of Alexander’s Expedition”]. In The Sea in the Greek Imagination (2016), Marie-Claire Beaulieu, furthermore, explores the sea as a cosmological boundary between the living and the dead, and the human and divine. Thus Ocean is recognized as a bounding principle in several registers, cartographic, ritualistic, and cosmogonic.

Finally, cartography in the literary tradition is also newly appreciated. I would be remiss to omit James Romm’s The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, 1992, where he explores the literary and philosophical underpinnings of Greek and Roman geographical literature as grounded in Greek concepts of space. In Apollonius of Rhodes and the Spaces of Hellenism (2011), William G. Thalmann explores how space is construed by the Argonauts’ complex interactions with non-Greeks, as informed by the multicultural environment (and its concomitant anxieties about identity) that transformed the Greek understanding of their own culture and the world in the post-Alexander universe. In my own work, I explore the interstices between science and culture. In forthcoming book chapters I investigate the Chorography of Pomponius’ Mela as a declaration of the author’s cultural identity (Roman and Iberian), and I scrutinize the political manipulation of cartography in Euripides’ Ion, Apollonius’ Argonautica, and Vergil’s Aeneid.

We have here surveyed just a selection of the scholarship on Greco-Roman cartography (in English) that reflects recent approaches. Cartography mattered to thinkers in antiquity. For them and us, understanding the deployment of places and peoples helps to impose order on the world, and it also aids in reinforcing a sense of identity and cultural or social value. The sources are varied and broad-ranging, from historical and political, to documentary, to subtle and not-so-subtle nods in the standard literary corpus (Martial writes himself onto a literary map in Epigram 1.61; and Ovid has Odysseus drawing sketches of battle plans at Troy on Calypso’s beach: Art of Love 2.125-142). Understanding, contextualizing, and interpreting these data with sensitivity to the contemporary context helps to restore the totality of cartographic knowledge and inquiry in antiquity. What matters is not if Aeschylus misplaced Themiscyra or Salmydessus (Prometheus Bound 724-726), or if Vergil got the relative longitudes of Rome and Carthage wrong (Aeneid 1.13-14; see Strabo 2.1.40), but rather what questions they were asking and how ancient authors brought the evidence to bear on those queries. How did the ancient conception of cartography mold the cultural and social world-views of the Greeks and Romans? What does this body of evidence tell us about Greco-Roman values, prejudices, and their interactions with the ‘other’? How was cartography employed as a political or cultural symbol? New approaches open up that world, providing us with an exciting glimpse into how the ancients viewed their world, themselves, and each other.

Select Bibliography

Beaulieu, Marie-Claire, The Sea in the Greek Imagination (2016).

Berggren, J. L. and A. Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters (2000).

Bianchetti, Serena, Michele Cataudella, and Hans-Joachim Gehrke, eds. Brill’s Companion to Ancient Geography: The Inhabited World in Greek and Roman Tradition (2016).

Bunbury, E. H. History of Ancient Geography (1879).

Canfora, L., “Postilla Testuale Sul Nuovo Artemidoro,” Quaderni di Storia 64 (2006): 45–60.

Casson, Lionel, Travel in the Ancient World (1994).

Dilke, O.A.W., Greek and Roman Maps (1985).

Diller, Aubrey, The Tradition of the Minor Greek Geographers (1952).

Dueck, Daniela, ed. Routledge Companion to Strabo (2017).

Dueck, Daniela, Geography in Classical Antiquity (2012).

Geus, Klaus and M. Rathmann, Vermessung der Oikoumenē (2013).

Guzmán Arias, Carmen, trad. & notas. Corografia (1989).

Harley, J.B. and D. Woodward. Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (1987): https://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/index.html

Heidel, W. A., The Frame of the Ancient Greek Maps (1937).

Irby, Georgia L., “The Politics of Cartography: Foundlings, Founders, Swashbucklers, and epic Shields,” in New Directions In Ancient Geography: Proceedings of the Association of Ancient Historians 14, edited by Duane W. Roller, forthcoming.

Irby, Georgia L., “Tracing the orbis terrarum from Tingentera,” in New Directions In Ancient Geography: Proceedings of the Association of Ancient Historians 14, edited by Duane W. Roller, forthcoming.

Irby, Georgia L., “Cartography,” in Georgia L. Irby, ed., A Companion to Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome (2016), pp. 819-835.

Jones, H. L., transl., Strabo: Geography (1917-1932).

Katherine Clarke, Between Geography and History: Hellenistic Constructions of the Roman World (1999).

Kennedy, Rebecca Futo and Molly Jones-Lewis, Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds (2016).

Kramer, B., “The Earliest Known Map of Spain (?) and the Geography of Artemidorus of Ephesus on Papyrus,” Imago Mundi 53 (2001): 115–120.

Parroni, P., introd., ed. crit. e comm. a cura. Pomponius Mela De chorographia libri tres (1984).

Radt, Stefan (ed.), Strabons Geographika (2002-1011).

Ranstrand, G., ed. Pomponius Mela: De chorographia libri tres (1971).

Reynolds, D. W., Forma urbis Romae: The Severan Marble Plan and the Urban Form of Ancient Rome (1997).

Roller, Duane W., A Historical and Topographical Guide to the Geography of Strabo (2018).

Roller, Duane W., “Geography,” in Georgia L. Irby, ed., A Companion to Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome (2016), pp. 247-262.

Roller, Duane W., Ancient Geography: The Discovery of the World in Classical Greece and Rome (2015).

Roller, Duane W., The Geography of Strabo: An English Translation with Introduction and Notes (2014).

Roller, Duane W., Eratosthenes’ Geography: Fragments Collected and Translated with Additional Material (2010).

Romer, Frank E., transl. and introd. Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World (1998).

Romm, James S., The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (1992).

Silberman, Alain, texte établi, trad. & annoté. Pomponius Mela: Chorographie (1988).

Talbert, Richard J. A. and Richard Unger, eds., Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods (2008).

Talbert, Richard J. A., Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered (2010).

Thalmann, William G., Apollonius of Rhodes and the Spaces of Hellenism (2011).

Thomson, J. O., History of Ancient Geography (1948).

Tozer, H. F., A History of Ancient Geography (1897).

Ukert, F. Geographie Der Griechen Und Romer Von Den Fruhesten Zeiten Bis Auf Ptolemåus (1816).

Warmington, E. H., Greek Geography (1934).