INTRODUCTION
It is difficult for a person in the twenty-first century, accustomed to maps, aerial photographs, and instant access to views of any place in the world, to comprehend the astonishing feats of ancient travelers and geographers. Greek scholars created a theoretical construct of the earth as a whole, and sailors, merchants, traders, and military commanders wandered far from home and brought back the topographical and ethnographic data that became the basis of geographical thought. Until the advent of the railroad in the mid-nineteenth century, the only means of transportation was by foot, beast of burden, or ship, limited to a few miles a day. One's horizon was literally that: the short distance one could see. The major tool for determining location was the eyes, and going several days from a known place could put the traveler in unfamiliar territory, which could only be related to the starting point by backtracking, in so far as that was possible. Northerly and southerly movement could be determined by changes in the height of celestial bodies, but there was no way to calculate easterly or westerly progress beyond the dead reckoning of distance traveled.
With such limitations, it is phenomenal that so much was actually learned about geography in Greco-Roman antiquity. Perhaps assisted by the enclosed nature of the Mediterranean and Black Sea system, which provided a perimeter to explore, by the sixth century BC Greeks had covered essentially all of its extent, and had begun to realize that the earth was a very large sphere (its curved surface was apparent to any sailor). In the following centuries, there was penetration as far as the arctic North Atlantic, south along the African coast (and perhaps all the way around the continent), and east to India, with some knowledge of the Chinese world beyond. By the Roman period all the eastern hemisphere was known except for Siberia and interior southern Africa, although the level of comprehension varied greatly in different areas. A parallel theoretical evolution had determined the size of the earth and the placement of its known portion on its sphere, with the understanding this was a very small part of its entirety. Moreover, there was discussion of the changes in climate and the length of day as one went north or south. It was even suggested, since the inhabited world was so small, that there might be other continents, a New World beyond the familiar one. Geography as a scholarly discipline developed in the latter third century BC and brought the empirical and theoretical data together. By the second century AD all the then known world had been mapped.
The study of ancient geography relies on three components, often separate but which must be considered collectively. First is the practical information: the topographical data gathered by the people who actually traveled. This phase of geography began with the first person who floated on a log to a neighboring island, or who went over the mountains to a nearby village, thereby expanding the geographical horizon. From late Neolithic times the most efficient way to travel was by ship, so sailors were the first long-distance voyagers, and they recorded in their minds sailing directions, winds, harbors, and the peoples that they encountered. These vagaries of seamanship were well known to Odysseus—the first sailor in the Greek world to emerge as an individual personality—and he was more concerned about the people whom he came upon (who were usually dangerous) than the places. Eventually a repertory of sailing itineraries and distances evolved, recorded in days of travel, information that was exchanged and shared in seaport cities. Land travel was slower to develop because of the maritime nature and rugged topography of much of the Greek world, but there were places that had no accessible coasts, such as interior Anatolia, and here primitive paths and roads were the first routes of travel.
The second element of ancient geography is the creation of a theoretical structure about the nature of the world. This was originally the province of the natural philosophers, as empirical evidence was lacking beyond one's immediate surroundings and the visibly curved surface of the earth. Moreover, early sailors and other travelers had no interest in theory. It was probably the Pythagoreans, perhaps as early as the sixth century BC, reinforced by Plato and others, who suggested that the earth was a sphere, and by the third century BC it was possible to calculate its size—using astronomical data—and to locate known places on its vast surface. There was also speculation about the history of the earth and the changes that it had undergone, as well as its climate. These various disciplines—natural philosophy, astronomy, and geology, as well as empirical data—came together in the latter third century BC when Eratosthenes of Kyrene published his Geography, the first work devoted to the topic and, incidentally, the first use of the term. Eratosthenes determined the size of the earth and then located known places on it, largely through relative positioning based on data from travelers' reports. He realized the inherent flaw in this technique, and, by the following century, trigonometric methods were used to position places astronomically, and therefore accurately, but this was never fully utilized in ancient times due to a lack of qualified observers. To the end of antiquity, most places were still located using on-the-ground reports from travelers.
The Romans continued exploration—but generally for military purposes—and learned about parts of the inhabited world that had previously been unknown, such as northern Europe. On the other hand, there were few further developments in geographical theory, other than a continued interest in issues regarding mapping of the earth, especially the problem of projecting a curved surface onto a flat map. But the geographical creativity of antiquity effectively ended in the middle of the second century AD with the Geographical Guide of Ptolemy of Alexandria. After this time there was continued refinement of detail, both theoretical and topographical, yet with the advent of Christianity, geography turned toward being driven almost solely by biblical exegesis.
The third consideration for the modern student of ancient geography is the sources. The land is still there, relatively unchanged, but the loss of ancient literature has fallen especially hard on geographical texts. Nevertheless literature remains the primary source for understanding ancient geography, with archaeology playing a secondary role, though especially valuable for physical evidence of the spread of Greek and Roman culture into remote areas. Only four geographical handbooks are extant from antiquity, a poor showing of the nearly 250 known Greek and Roman geographers,1 most of whom are known solely through quotations from later authors, or by name alone. Of the four that are extant, all are from the Roman period. The earliest, and most important, is the Geography of Strabo of Amaseia, written in Greek and 17 books in length, completed in the early first century AD. Without this extensive and complex work almost nothing would have survived about the history of geography before the Roman period: major geographical authors whose texts are lost, including Eratosthenes, the inventor of the discipline, are known almost entirely through Strabo's summaries of their work. This of course creates a problem, since Strabo had his own agenda and was writing about geographical theory through the perspective of an educated Greek functioning in the Roman empire. Nevertheless, as can be seen in the pages that follow, Strabo is the primary source for the topic of ancient geography.
The handbook written by Pomponius Mela in the 40s AD, titled Chorographia, has the unique status of being the only extant free-standing geographical treatise from antiquity written in Latin, and is important for that reason, but its brevity—only three books long—means that it is less significant than the other surviving writings. More important are the geographical books (2–6) of the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, written a generation after Mela. Though part of a much longer work, Pliny's five geographical books could stand alone as an independent treatise, the fullest surviving geographical account in Latin. He made exhaustive use of material obtained in the early years of the Roman empire, including a dazzling array of toponyms.
In the mid-second century AD, Ptolemy of Alexandria completed his Geographical Guide, a work of great importance in medieval and Renaissance times. It is effectively the terminal point of the present study. Ptolemy was a mathematician and astronomer, and his primary concerns were the role of the latter in geography and how to make a map of the known world. In the process he located (with varying degrees of accuracy) over 8,000 places, from the Baltic south to the legendary Mountains of the Moon in central Africa, and east to the Malay Peninsula. This is the most complete topographical list from antiquity, and represents the culmination of ancient geographical knowledge.
Needless to say, these four works are not the totality of extant ancient literature on the topic of geography. Many—if not most—surviving ancient authors from Homer on have geographical material, including numerous writers who are not usually thought to be geographical in their orientation, such as Aeschylus and Vergil. Polybios and Julius Caesar, hardly remembered as geographers, were skilled practitioners of the discipline. There is also a unique geographical literary genre, the periplous or the coastal sailing manual. Some of these actually survive, and information from others lies buried in extant geographical works. Geography also has its literary aspects, and its data can be used metaphorically and allegorically, or even to create a fantasy world.2 But one returns to Strabo again and again to learn about the practical aspects of ancient geography.
The modern study of ancient geography began in the Renaissance, when the major texts became available and were of great use to the explorers of the era: Columbus was totally familiar with the extant writings on the topic. Yet like so much of classical studies not considered to be in the literary mainstream, examination of the topic has languished in modern times until recently. In English, the seminal work remains E. H. Bunbury's A History of Ancient Geography (London 1883). There are also J. Oliver Thomson's History of Ancient Geography (Cambridge 1948), and The Ancient Explorers, by M. Cary and E. H. Warmington (revised edition, Baltimore 1963). Despite the age of these works, all are still important in differing ways.
It is only in the last two decades that English editions of the four major geographical handbooks have begun to appear, beginning with Pomponius Mela (F. E. Romer, Pomponius Mela's Description of the World, Ann Arbor 1998), and followed by Ptolemy (J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones, Ptolemy's Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters, Princeton 2000), although this edition does not include the topographical material (at present only available in German: Ptolemaios, Handbuch der Geographie, ed. Alfred Stückelberger and Gerd Grasshoff, Basel 2006). A new translation of Strabo's Geography has recently appeared (Duane W. Roller, The Geography of Strabo, Cambridge 2014); Pliny's geographical chapters await their English editor. Needless to say, there are numerous other recent articles and books about various aspects of ancient geography, many of which appear in the bibliography.
A Note on Ancient Measurements
At first, distances were recorded in sailing days and camel (or other beast of burden) days. Eventually various populations in the ancient world developed their own measurements: the Greeks the stadion, the Persians the parasang, the Egyptians the schoinos, and the Romans the mile. All of these were used in Greek and Roman geographical documents. Except for the Roman mile (about 4875 feet), these measurements were highly variable and uncertain, and often based on intuitive or traditional data rather than accurate measurement. It was only in the Roman period that standard distances were established, with the invention of the odometer, perhaps by Roman military engineers.3 Yet calculations still remained rough, and thus modern equivalents are avoided. Very approximately, there are about 30 stadia to the parasang and 8–10 stadia to the mile, but any attempt at accurate translation into modern lengths is impossible as well as misleading.
Acknowledgements
Among the many who assisted in the preparation of this work are Georgia L. Irby, Molly Ayn Jones-Lewis, Paul T. Keyser, Letitia K. Roller, Richard Stoneman, Richard Talbert, Lisbet Thoresen, Alex Wright, Sara Magness, and many others at I.B.Tauris, the Harvard College Library and the libraries of the Ohio State University (especially its interlibrary loan services) and Stanford University.