Ancient World Mapping Center

The Center is pleased to announce a new entry in our Maps for Texts Series. The single, static map (available via dropbox) plots Theophanes’ journeys between Hermopolis and Antioch in the early fourth century C.E., as recorded in the Rylands Papyri. The map is based on the edition by Colin Roberts (1952), and the translation by John Matthews, The Journey of Theophanes: Travel, Business, and Daily Life in the Roman East (2006). The name-forms and dates marked are as in the papyri.

Another book of interest for those who study the geography of Asia Minor was published earlier this year. Anca Dan and Stéphane Lebreton’s co-edited second volume of Études des fleuves d’Asie Mineure dans l’Antiquité offers individual case studies of the history and literary attestation of rivers in Asia Minor. Details can be found here.

Duane Roller’s A Historical and Topographical Guide to the Geography of Strabo was published in February to accompany his translation of Strabo’s Geography. Details can be found here.

Those with interest in geography and frontiers will be interested in Timothy Mitford’s 2 volume work East of Asia Minor: Rome’s Hidden Frontier. Mitford’s work situates the literary and epigraphic records from the north-eastern frontier of the Roman Empire in the terrain of the region. Details can be found here.

The Center is excited to announce a new addition to the Maps for Texts series, an interactive web map of Hierokles’ Synekdemos, available here.  The map follows Hierokles’ text in Ernest Honigmann’s edition (Brussels, 1939), and aims to supersede his four maps.  With the Center’s Map Tiles as its base, the map marks all cities and regions which may identified and located with at least some confidence according to the Barrington Atlas and related publications listed below.  Greek names are transliterated as in the Barrington Atlas (see Directory, p. vii).  A full database lists all the place-names in the Synekdemos with references (thus including those that cannot be located and marked on the map).  In addition, the text of Honigmann’s edition of the Synekdemos (and of the geographic work of George of Cyprus) is accessible via the Center’s Dropbox.  On Hierokles and George of Cyprus, see further briefly, The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ss. vv.

Anyone with an interest in the fields of the history of science and cartography should read two important new books. The first, A Companion to Science, Technology and Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome by Georgia Irby, presents a superb overview of its subject (and should have been featured here sooner–apologies). The scope of the second, The Iberian Peninsula in Ptolemy’s Geography by Olivier Defaux (published by Topoi ISBN 978-3-9816384-6-2), is wider than the title indicates. It should be read by everyone with an interest in any part of Ptolemy’s Geography.

AWMC is excited to launch a new series of “Maps for Texts,” providing accurate, high-quality maps for a variety of ancient documents which otherwise lack them.  For the first entry in the series, we have produced two maps of Ptolemy’s Table of Important Cities, available now in the dropdown menu under Free Maps (or click here).  For questions, comments, or suggestions for future Maps for Texts, please email awmc@unc.edu.

A new volume edited by Richard Talbert and Fred Naiden will be published this month by Oxford University Press.  Mercury’s Wings features numerous maps prepared by the Ancient World Mapping Center; special thanks are due to former Graduate Research Assistant Alexandra Locking, who served as lead cartographer on the project.  The book features numerous contributions outstanding on the means and meaning of communication in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds, and is sure to interest scholars of ancient connectivity and travel.  Details available here.

Anyone interested in ancient geographic writing (and those who enjoyed Benet Salway’s excellent talk on Strabo last week) may be interested in the newly published Routledge Companion to Strabo, edited by Daniela Dueck.  Details available here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Strabo/Dueck/p/book/9781138904330.