The Legacy of Greco-Roman Mapmaking
New York Public Library
A folio from a 15th-century Latin translation of Ptolemy’s influential “Geographia.”
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: September 30, 2013
Long before people could look upon Earth
from afar, completing a full orbit every 90 minutes, the Greeks and the
Romans of antiquity had to struggle to understand their world’s size
and shape. Their approaches differed: the philosophical Greeks, it has
been said, measured the world by the stars; the practical, road-building
Romans by milestones.
The Morgan Library and Museum
An illumination from a 13th-century copy of the
“Commentary on the Apocalypse and the Book of Daniel,” originally by the
eighth-century Spanish monk and geographer Beatus of Liebana.
American Numismatic Society
A third-century Roman coin shows Emperor Diocletian holding a globe, a symbol of power.
Columbia University
A 15th-century copy of an ancient manuscript from Constantinople.
Houghton Library, Harvard University
A diagram of the solar system from a popular
16th-century astronomy textbook by the French cartographer Oronce Fine.
As the Greek geographer Strabo wrote at the time: “We may learn from
both the evidence of our senses and from experiences, that the inhabited
world is an island, for wherever it has been possible for men to reach
the limits of the earth, sea has been found, and this sea we call
‘Oceanus.’ And whenever we have not been able to learn by the evidence
of sense, there reason points the way.”
Strabo’s words will greet visitors to a new exhibition, “Measuring and
Mapping Space: Geographic Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity,” which
opens Friday at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, at 15 East 84th Street in Manhattan. The show runs through Jan. 5.
Roger S. Bagnall, director of the institute, an affiliate of New York
University, said the exhibition would not only cross ancient borders and
cultures but also modern disciplines. “Our exhibitions and digital
teams,” he said, “present a 21st-century approach to the ancient
mentality concerning geographic space and how it is represented.”
The show brings together more than 40 objects that provide an overview
of Greco-Roman geographical thinking — art and pottery, as well as maps
based on classical texts. (Hardly any original maps survive; the ones in
the exhibition were created in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance from
Greek and Roman descriptions.)
“Geography is not just maps,” said the guest curator, Roberta
Casagrande-Kim, a scholar of classical concepts of the underworld that
go back well before Dante took his journey through the nine circles of
hell. “There is also the cognitive side underlying mapping,” she said.
Making sense of the world’s dimensions must have seemed daunting at
first. Plato wrote of Socrates saying the world is very large and those
who dwell between Gibraltar and the Caucasus — in his memorable imagery —
live “in a small part of it about the sea, like ants or frogs about a
pond, and that many other people live in many other such regions.”
An early advance in Greek thinking was Aristotle’s discovery, in the
latter half of the fourth century B.C., that the world must be
spherical. He based this on observations of lunar eclipses, ships
disappearing hull first on the horizon, and the changing field of stars
observed as one travels north and south.
Then Eratosthenes, a librarian at Alexandria in the third century B.C.,
employed the new geometry to measure the world’s size with simultaneous
angles of the sun’s shadow taken at widely distant sites in Egypt. That
yielded a remarkably accurate measure of Earth’s circumference: it was
clear that the world they knew — the three connected continents of Asia,
Europe and Africa — was only a part of lands unknown, out of sight but
not out of mind.
Other artifacts on view illustrate ancient methods of surveying and
measuring lands, and some of the earliest efforts to measure longitude
and latitude and to divide the world into climate zones. From north to
south, both the Greeks and the Romans identified the frigid Arctic
Circle, the northern temperate hemisphere, the torrid Tropic of Cancer,
the southern temperate zone and the South Pole. The two temperate zones
were believed to be the only habitable regions, but contact between the
two was thought unlikely.
Across the wall of the first gallery is projected a digital replica of
the Peutinger Map, more than 22 feet long and 2 feet high, illustrating
how Roman mapping was at once practical and magnificent. It charts the
empire’s roads, cities, ports and forts from Britain to India.
Sketches of trees mark forests in Germany. Topography is minimal, roads
are off-scale wide, towns are indicated by symbolic walls or towers —
more of a traveler’s guide but much too large to serve as a handy road
map.
In a study of the map, Richard J. A. Talbert, a historian at the
University of North Carolina who specializes in cartography of the
Greeks and the Romans, noted that in one sense it was an example of
common Roman “journey” charts, much like the Greek “periploi” — mostly
written descriptions of landmarks and ports mariners were likely to
encounter.
Geographers then were less committed to drawing maps than to narrative
wayfinding. Distances had priority over orientations; getting from here
to there was more important than the lay of the land.
An early copy of the map came to light in the 17th century and was owned
for years by Konrad Peutinger, a Hapsburg diplomat and map collector.
It is now is in the Austrian National Library in Vienna.
The map, probably created in the early fourth century A.D., may have
been intended to impress the emperor’s subjects and notable guests, Dr.
Talbert has concluded. It was oriented with the capital at its center,
showing that all roads indeed led to Rome.
Mapping was a tool of propaganda, just as many Roman coins showed the
emperor Augustus, or Octavian or Diocletian, holding a globe, a symbol
of the whole world in his power. Jennifer Y. Chi, the institute’s
exhibitions director and a specialist in Roman sculpture, said that
Augustus, in particular, “promoted his power systematically through many
different media, and even the illiterate understood the globe’s
symbolism.”
The rarely exhibited material is on loan from several American
institutions, including the Morgan Library and Museum, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the American Numismatic
Society and the libraries at Columbia and Harvard. The show is supported
by the Leon Levy Foundation.
All in all, whether guided by the stars or by imperial roads, the Greeks
and the Romans did well in preparing the way to geographic knowledge of
worlds known and unknown, real and imaginary. They anticipated modern
concepts of mapmaking: anything that can be spatially conceived can be
mapped.
The most influential of the ancient Greeks was Claudium Ptolemy, the
foremost scholar at the Alexandria library in the second century A.D.
Two of his books, one on astronomy, and another on geography, were
finally translated into Latin in the Middle Ages.
Notes accompanying the exhibition point out that Ptolemy’s “Geographia”
provided ample information on locations of ancient lands and cities,
enabling Renaissance cartographers to prepare the first fairly modern
world maps, the “Mappa mundi” style that was followed for the next
couple of centuries. The maps were decorated with the eight classical
headwinds; symbols taken from Aristotle’s conception of the primary
elements of fire, earth, water and air; and a scattering of zodiac signs
around the edges.
Even Ptolemy’s errors were influential. Instead of sticking to
Eratosthenes’ more accurate estimate of Earth’s size, Ptolemy handed
down a serious underestimate that later apparently emboldened Columbus
to think he could sail west to reach China or Japan.
Instead, he reached landfall in what became known as the West Indies —
about the distance from Europe that Ptolemy had led him to expect, but
with no “Grand Khan” in sight.
So it was perhaps no coincidence that the rediscovery of Greco-Roman
geography fostered the age of Western exploration. After 1492, there
were new worlds to measure and map. Within two centuries, exhibition
notes remind us, “the primacy of ancient geographic knowledge and
mapping conventions came to an end.”
New discoveries and technologies had made Greco-Roman geography
obsolete. But its influence helped shape the way we still look at the
world.
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