AUTHOR: CLAUDIUS PTOLEMY
DATE: C. AD 150
Geographia (literally, The Geography) was a landmark hybrid work by the celebrated Greek polymath, written around the middle of the second century BC. A mixture of philosophical treatise on the nature of geography and cartography, an atlas and a gazetteer, it serves as an unparalleled summation of geographical knowledge up to that moment in time. Moreover, its influence on future geographers and cartographers was immense throughout both Christian Europe and the Islamic world well into the early modern age. Geographia has been pivotal in moulding how we see and conceptualize our world for well over one and a half thousand years.
NEW WORLD VIEW
In 1569, the Flanders-born Gerardus Mercator published a new world map projection entitled Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio ad Usum Navigantium Emendate Accommodata (‘New and More Complete Representation of the Terrestrial Globe Properly Adapted for Use in Navigation’). Like Ptolemy’s work, it proved a game-changer, its blueprint still evident in the maps we use today. Indeed, the nineteenth-century Scandinavian aristocrat and explorer, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, said that Mercator ‘stands unsurpassed in the history of cartography since the time of Ptolemy’. In 1595, Mercator also coined the term ‘Atlas’ for a cartographical work when he published his Atlas Sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura (‘Atlas or Cosmographical Meditations Upon the Creation of the Universe, and the Universe as Created').
Ptolemy was born around AD 100 and lived in or very near to Alexandria, the Egyptian city that was then under the hegemony of the Roman Empire. Living in Africa under Roman rule and writing in Greek, he was at the cusp of several intellectual traditions. Like other great intellects of the classical era, he worked across multiple fields, including astronomy, astrology, mathematics and even music. The author of numerous academic works, Geographia is one of three for which he is most famed, the others being the Almagest (which sought to solve questions about the motion of the stars and planets through mathematics) and Tetrabiblos, a treatise on astrology.
Geographia is made up of eight books divided into three broad sections. In the first book, Ptolemy considers the method behind his work – how he went about gathering and arranging the geographical and cartographical information in the other seven books. Maps had been in production for several centuries by the time he was writing, but he also considered approaches for creating better maps with more accurate projections.
Books II–VII serve as the ‘gazetteer’, a catalogue of those major places around the world then known to the Romans, complete with each location’s latitude and longitude. The end of Book VII is taken up with consideration of a number of projections designed to allow for the most accurate possible depiction of a world map, while Book VIII comprises a collection of detailed regional maps. Although there may have been as many as sixty-four maps, later editions of the work tended to carry twelve of Asia, ten of Europe and four of Africa. In terms of extent, Ptolemy mapped the known world from the Canary Islands in the west to Magnus Sinus (equating today to an area in the Gulf of Thailand) in the east, and from the Shetland Islands in the north as far south as the sources of the River Nile.
Ptolemy's landmark world map from his Geographia c. AD 150
The work was built upon Ptolemy’s own ideas combined with existing knowledge collected from earlier works, both Roman and Persian. In particular, he acknowledged his debt to Marinus of Tyre (Tyre being a Roman province in what is now Syria), who had produced an atlas – of which no copies are known to have survived – a few decades prior to Ptolemy writing Geographia. Among Marinus’s innovations was his adoption of a more fully realized system of latitude and longitude. Both men also displayed a willingness to incorporate information provided by merchants and seamen into their cartographical representations much more than earlier generations of map-makers like Strabo and Pliny the Elder.
No early copy of Geographia survives but, in common with other of Ptolemy’s works, it was widely copied and distributed in the centuries that followed. It was certainly circulating in an Arabic translation in the ninth century, although its popularity in Europe seems to have waned. The earliest extant Greek versions date to the thirteenth century, after the Byzantine monk and scholar, Maximus Planudes, hunted down a copy. Then, in the early fourteenth century, the first major Latin translation was made by the Florentine humanist, Jacobus Angelus, under the title Geographia Claudii Ptolemaei. (An earlier translation from an Arabic manuscript undertaken for Roger II of Sicily in the twelfth century did not survive.) A print edition appeared in Bologna in 1477 and is thought to be the first printed book with engraved illustrations.
Angelus’s work prompted a new interest in Ptolemy’s cartography in the West, much of it having been long forgotten. Where medieval map-makers had, for example, given prominence to places according to their perceived importance, Ptolemy inspired a more scientific approach (albeit still laden with numerous errors) based on mathematics, more accurate measurement and greater consideration of projection. His gazetteer, meanwhile, restored knowledge of precise geographical locations that had long ago been lost to the Western world.
Renaissance Europe thus started to see the world drawn differently. To a modern eye, Ptolemy’s world map is obviously flawed, both in terms of orientation and size. Yet it was infinitely more accurate than what had come before and, crucially, armed future cartographers with the tools to construct ever more accurate representations.