Geography (Ptolemy)

The Geography, also known by its Latin names as the Geographia and the Cosmographia, is a gazetteer, an atlas, and a treatise on cartography, compiling the geographical knowledge of the 2nd-century Roman Empire. Originally written by Claudius Ptolemy in Greek at Alexandria around 150 AD, the work was a revision of a now-lost atlas by Marinus of Tyre using additional Roman and Persian gazetteers and new principles.
Its translation into Arabic by al-Khwarismi in the 9th century was highly influential on the Geography and [cartography in medieval Islam|geographical knowledge and cartographic traditions of the Islamic world]. Alongside the works of Islamic scholars—and the commentary containing revised and more accurate data by Alfraganus—Ptolemy's work was subsequently highly influential on Medieval and Renaissance Europe.

Manuscripts

Versions of Ptolemy's work in antiquity were probably proper atlases with attached maps, although some scholars believe that the references to maps in the text were later additions.
No Greek manuscript of the Geography survives from earlier than the 13th century. However fragmentary papyri of later somewhat derivative works such as the Table of Noteworthy Cities have been found with the earliest, Rylands Library , dating to the early 3rd century. A letter written by the Byzantine monk Maximus Planudes records that he searched for one for Chora Monastery in the summer of 1295; one of the earliest surviving texts may have been one of those he then assembled. In Europe, maps were sometimes redrawn using the coordinates provided by the text, as Planudes was forced to do. Later scribes and publishers could then copy these new maps, as Athanasius did for the Byzantine emperors|emperor] Andronicus II Palaeologus. The three earliest surviving texts with maps are those from Constantinople based on Planudes's work.
File:Rylands Library Greek Papyrus 522.jpg|thumb|A 3rd century papyrus fragment of Ptolemy's Table of Noteworthy Cities
The first Latin translation of these texts was made in 1406 or 1407 by Jacobus Angelus in Florence, Italy, under the name Geographia Claudii Ptolemaei. It is not thought that his edition had maps, although Manuel Chrysoloras had given Palla Strozzi a Greek copy of Planudes's maps in Florence in 1397.

Repository and Collection Number	Siglum	Date	Maps	Image
Vatican Library,	X	12th-13th century	No extant maps
Copenhagen University Library, Fragmentum Fabricianum Graecum 23	F	13th century	Fragmentary; originally world and 26 regional
Vatican Library, Urbinas Graecus 82	U	13th century	World and 26 regional
Istanbul Sultan's Library, Seragliensis 57	K	13th century	World and 26 regional
Vatican Library, Vat. Gr. 177	V	13th century	No extant maps
Laurentian Library, Plut. 28.49	O	14th century	Originally world, 1 Europe, 2 Asia, 1 Africa, 63 regional
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gr. Supp. 119	C	14th century	No extant maps
Vatican Library, Vat. Gr. 178	W	14th century	No extant maps
British Library, Burney Gr. 111	T	14th-15th century	Maps derived from Florence, Pluto 28.49
Bodleian Library, 3376 -Qu. Catal. i, Cod. Seld. 41	N	15th century	No extant maps
Vatican Library, Pal. Gr. 388		15th century	World and 63 regional No extant maps
Laurentian Library, Pluto 28.9		15th century	No extant maps
Biblioteca Marciana, Gr. 516	R	15th century	Originally world and 26 regional
Vatican Library, Pal. Gr. 314	Z	15th century	No extant maps; written by Michael Apostolios in Crete
British Library, Harley MS 3686		15th century
Huntington Library, Wilton Codex		15th century	One world, ten of Europe, four of Africa, and twelve of Asia, elegantly coloured and illuminated with burnished gold.

Stemma

Berggren & Jones place these manuscripts into a stemma whereby U, K, F and N are connected with the activities of Maximos Planudes. From a sister manuscript to UKFN descends R, V, W & C, however the maps were either copied defectively or not at all. "Of the greatest importance for the text of the Geography" they state is manuscript X ; "because it is the only copy that is uninfluenced by the Byzantine revision." e.g. the 13th-14th century corrections of Planudes, possibly associated with recreating the maps.
Regarding the maps, they conclude that it was unlikely that extant maps survived from which the above stemma descends, even if maps existed in antiquity:

"The transmission of Ptolemy's text certainly passed through a stage when the manuscripts were too small to contain the maps. Planudes and his assistants therefore probably had no pictorial models, and the success of their enterprise is proof that Ptolemy succeeded in his attempt to encode the map in words and numbers. The copies of the maps in later manuscripts and printed editions of the Geography were reproduced from Planudes' reconstructions."

Mittenhuber further divides the stemma into two recensions of the original c.AD 150 lost work: Ξ and Ω. Recension Ω contains most of the extant manuscripts and is subdivided into a further two groups: Δ and Π. Group Δ contains parchment manuscripts from the end of the thirteenth century, which are the earliest extant manuscripts of the Geography; these are U, K & F. Recension, Ξ, is represented by one codex only, X. Mittenhuber agrees with Berggren & Jones, stating that "The so-called Codex X is of particular significance, because it contains many local names and coordinates that differ from the other manuscripts... which cannot be explained by mere errors in the tradition.".
Although no manuscripts survive from earlier than the late 13th century; there are references to the existence of ancient codicies in late antiquity. One such example is in an epistle by Cassiodorus :

“Tum, si vos notitiae nobilis cura inflammaverit, habetis Ptolemaei codicem, qui sic omnia loca evidenter expressit, ut eum cunctarum regionum paene incolam fuisse iudicetis. Eoque fit, ut uno loco positi, sicut monachos decet, animo percurratis, quod aliquorum peregrinatio plurimo labore collegit.”.

The existence of ancient recensions that differ fundamentally to the surviving manuscript tradition can be seen in the epitomes of Markianos by Stephanus:

"Καὶ ἄλλοι οὕτως διὰ του π Πρετανίδες νῆσοι, ὡς Μαρκιανὸς καὶ Πτολεμαῖος."

The tradition preserved within the stemma of surviving manuscripts by Stückelberger & Grasshoff only preserves "Β" and not "Π" recentions of "Βρεττανικήσ".

The Geography consists of three sections, divided among 8 books. Book I is a treatise on cartography and chorography, describing the methods used to assemble and arrange Ptolemy's data. From Book II through the beginning of Book VII, a gazetteer provides longitude and latitude values for the world known to the ancient Romans. The rest of Book VII provides details on three projections to be used for the construction of a map of the world, varying in complexity and fidelity. Book VIII constitutes an atlas of regional maps. The maps include a recapitulation of some of the values given earlier in the work, which were intended to be used as captions to clarify the map's contents and maintain their accuracy during copying. Book 8 formed the basis for the Table of Noteworthy Cities.

Cartographical treatise

Maps based on scientific principles had been made in Europe since the time of Eratosthenes in the 3rd century BC. Ptolemy improved the treatment of map projections. He provided instructions on how to create his maps in the first section of the work.

Gazetteer

The gazetteer section of Ptolemy's work provided latitude and longitude coordinates for all the places and geographical features in the work. Latitude was expressed in degrees of arc from the equator, the same system that is used now, though Ptolemy used fractions of a degree rather than minutes of arc. His Prime Meridian, of 0 longitude, ran through the Fortunate Isles, the westernmost land recorded, at around the position of El Hierro in the Canary Islands. The maps spanned 180 degrees of longitude from the Fortunate Isles in the Atlantic to China.
Ptolemy was aware that Europe knew only about a quarter of the globe.

Atlas

Ptolemy's work included a single large and less detailed world map and then separate and more detailed regional maps. The first Greek manuscripts compiled after Maximus Planudes's rediscovery of the text had as many as 64 regional maps. The standard set in Western Europe came to be 26: 10 European maps, 4 African maps, and 12 Asian maps. As early as the 1420s, these canonical maps were complemented by extra-Ptolemaic regional maps depicting, e.g., Scandinavia.

Content

The Geography is spread over 8 books with the main body of the work is a list of some 8000 toponyms comprising the Oikumene of the second century AD. Book 1 is written in prose and is Ptolemy's explanation of the project, his method and his sources. Book 8 offers descriptions for each of the maps created in books 2-7 and forms the basis of the Table of Noteworthy Cities. The critical edition was published by Stückelberger, Mittenhuber and Klöti.

Book 1

Book 1 is a theoretical treatise by Ptolemy outlining the subject matter, previous work and instructing the reader how to draw a world map using his projection systems. The sections are, to use Ptolemy's original titles:

On the difference between world cartography and regional cartography
On the prerequisites for world cartography
How the number of stades in the earth's circumference can be obtained from the number of stades in an arbitrary rectilinear interval, and vice versa, even if is not on a single meridian
That it is necessary to give priority to the phenomena over from records of travel
That it is necessary to follow the most recent researches because of changes in the world over time
On Marinos' guide to world cartography
Revision of Marinos' latitudinal dimension of the known world on the basis of the phenomena
The same revision , on the basis of land journeys
The same revision , on the basis of sea journeys
That one should not put the Aithiopians south of the parallel situated opposite to that through Meroe
On the computations that Marinos improperly made for the longitudinal dimension of the oikoumene
The revision of the longitudinal dimension of the known world on the basis of journeys by land
The same revision on the basis of journeys by sea
On the crossing from the Golden Peninsula to Kattigara
On the inconsistencies in details of Marinos' exposition
That certain matters escaped notice in the boundaries of the provinces
On the inconsistencies between and the reports ofour time
On the inconvenience of Marinos' compilations for drawing a map of the oikoumene
On the convenience of our catalogue for making a map
On the disproportional nature of Marinos' geographical map
On the things that should be preserved in a planar map
On how one should make a map of the oikoumene on a globe
List of the meridians and parallels to be included in the map
Method of making a map of the oikoumene in the plane in proper proportionality with its configuration on the globe

Book 2

Western Atlantic fringes, Gaul, Central Europe and the Iberian Peninsula.

Chapter	Region
Prologue
1	Britannia: Hibernia
2	Britannia: Albion
3	Hispanic Baetica
4	Hispanic Tarraconensis
5	Hispanic Lusitania
6	Aquitanian Gaul
7	Lugdunensian Gaul
8	Belgic Gaul
9	Narbonensian Gaul
10	Greater Germania
11	Raetia and Vindelica
12	Noricum
13	Upper Pannonia
14	Lower Pannonia
15	Illyria or Liburnia and Dalmatia

Book 3

, Greece and the major Mediterranean Islands.

Chapter	Region
1	Italy
2	Corsica
3	Sardinia
4	Sicily
5	Sarmatia
6	Tauric Peninsula
7	Iazyges Metanastae
8	Dacia
9	Upper Moesia
10	Lower Moesia
11	Thracia and the Peloponnesian Peninsula
12	Macedonia
13	Epirus
14	Achaia
15	Crete

Book 4

from Morocco to Egypt and Ethiopia.

Chapter	Region
1	Mauritania Tingitana
2	Mauritania Caesariensis
3	Numidia and Africa proper
4	Cyrenaica
5	Marmarica, which is properly called Libya, All of Egypt, both Lower and Upper
6	Libya Interior
7	Ethiopia below Egypt
8	Ethiopia in the interior below this

Book 5

Covering Anatolia, Asia Minor, the Middle East and Near East as well as Cyprus.

Chapter	Region
1	Bithynia and Pontus
2	Asia
3	Lycia
4	Pamphylia
5	Galatia
6	Cappadocia
7	Cilicia
8	Asiatic Sarmatia
9	Colchis
10	Iberia
11	Albania
12	Greater Armenia
13	Cyprus
14	Syria
15	Palestine
16	Arabia Petraea
17	Mesopotamia
18	Arabia Deserta
19	Babylonia

Book 6

In book 6, Ptolemy covers the Near East, Caucuses and Central Asia.

Chapter	Region
1	Assyria
2	Media
3	Susiane
4	Persis
5	Parthia
6	Karmania
7	Eudaimon Arabia
8	Karmianien
9	Hyrkanien
10	Margiane
11	Bactriane
12	Sogdianer
13	Saken
14	Skythia
15	Skythia
16	Serike
17	Areia
18	Paropanisaden
19	Drangiana
20	Archosien
21	Gedrosien

Book 7

, China, and Sri Lanka.

Chapter	Description
1	India before the Ganges
2	India beyond the Ganges
3	Land of Sinen
4	Taprobane
5	Summary caption of the map of the oikoumene
6	The mapping of a ringed globe with the oikoumene
7	Caption for the flattening

Book 8

Descriptions of the maps created by the previous sections with details of day length at solstice, etc. The gazetter of toponyms is thought to have formed the basis for the Table of Noteworthy Cities.

Chapter	Description
1	On the basis for dividing the oikoumene into the maps
2	Which things are appropriate to include in the caption for each map
3	Europe Map 1
4	Europe Map 2
5	Europe Map 3
6	Europe Map 4
7	Europe Map 5
8	Europe Map 6
9	Europe Map 7
10	Europe Map 8
11	Europe Map 9
12	Europe Map 10
13	Africa Map 1
14	Africa Map 2
15	Africa Map 3
16	Africa Map 4
17	Asia Map 1
18	Asia Map 2
19	Asia Map 3
20	Asia Map 4
21	Asia Map 5
22	Asia Map 6
23	Asia Map 7
24	Asia Map 8
25	Asia Map 9
26	Asia Map 10
27	Asia Map 11
28	Asia Map 12
29	Directory of the lands of the oikoumene
30	List of length and width of individual maps

History

Antiquity

The original treatise by Marinus of Tyre that formed the basis of Ptolemy's Geography has been completely lost. A world map based on Ptolemy was displayed in Augustodunum in late Roman times. Pappus, writing at Alexandria in the 4th century, produced a commentary on Ptolemy's Geography and used it as the basis of his Chorography of the Ecumene. Later imperial writers and mathematicians, however, seem to have restricted themselves to commenting on Ptolemy's text, rather than improving upon it; surviving records actually show decreasing fidelity to real position. Nevertheless, Byzantine scholars continued these geographical traditions throughout the Medieval period.
Whereas previous Greco-Roman geographers such as Strabo and Pliny the Elder demonstrated a reluctance to rely on the contemporary accounts of sailors and merchants who plied distant areas of the Indian Ocean, Marinus and Ptolemy betray a much greater receptiveness to incorporating information received from them. For instance, Grant Parker argues that it would be highly implausible for them to have constructed the Bay of Bengal as precisely as they did without the accounts of sailors. When it comes to the account of the Golden Chersonese and the Magnus Sinus, Marinus and Ptolemy relied on the testimony of a Greek sailor named Alexandros, who claimed to have visited a far eastern site called "Cattigara".

Medieval Islam

were using copies of Ptolemy's Almagest and Geography by the 9th century. At that time, in the court of the caliph al-Maʾmūm, al-Khwārazmī compiled his Book of the Depiction of the Earth which mimicked the Geography in providing the coordinates for 545 cities and regional maps of the Nile, the Island of the Jewel, the Sea of Darkness, and the Sea of Azov. A 1037 copy of these are the earliest extant maps from Islamic lands. The text clearly states that al-Khwārazmī was working from an earlier map, although this could not have been an exact copy of Ptolemy's work: his Prime Meridian was 10° east of Ptolemy's, he adds some places, and his latitudes differ. C.A. Nallino suggests that the work was not based on Ptolemy but on a derivative world map, presumably in Syriac or Arabic. The coloured map of al-Maʾmūm constructed by a team including al-Khwārazmī was described by the Persian encyclopædist al-Masʿūdī around 956 as superior to the maps of Marinus and Ptolemy, probably indicating that it was built along similar mathematical principles. It included 4530 cities and over 200 mountains.
Despite beginning to compile numerous gazetteers of places and coordinates indebted to Ptolemy, Muslim scholars made almost no direct use of Ptolemy's principles in the maps which have survived. Instead, they followed al-Khwārazmī's modifications and the orthogonal projection advocated by Suhrāb's early 10th-century treatise on the Marvels of the Seven Climes to the End of Habitation. Surviving maps from the medieval period were not done according to mathematical principles. The world map from the 11th-century Book of Curiosities is the earliest surviving map of the Muslim or Christian worlds to include a geographic [coordinate system] but the copyist seems to have not understood its purpose, starting it from the left using twice the intended scale and then giving up halfway through. Its presence does strongly suggest the existence of earlier, now-lost maps which had been mathematically derived in the manner of Ptolemy, al-Khwārazmi, or Suhrāb. There are surviving reports of such maps.
Ptolemy's Geography was translated from Arabic into Latin at the court of King Roger II of Sicily in the 12th century AD. However, no copy of that translation has survived.

Renaissance

The Greek text of the Geography reached Florence from Constantinople in about 1400 and was translated into Latin by Jacobus Angelus of Scarperia around 1406. The reception of the Geography in Latin Europe was diverse. In the first half of the 15th century, Florentine humanists used it mainly as a philological resource to understand the geography of ancient texts; Venetian cartographers attempted to reconcile Ptolemaic maps with portolan charts and medieval mappaemundi, and French and German scholars with an interest in astrology focused on Ptolemy's cosmographical concepts. Over the second half of the century, the prestige of the Geography grew to become the necessary framework of any reflection on geographical space.
The first printed edition with maps, published in 1477 in Bologna, was also the first printed book with engraved illustrations. Many editions followed, some following traditional versions of the maps, and others updating them. An edition published at Ulm in 1482 was the first one printed north of the Alps. It became a commercial success and was reprinted in 1486. Also in 1482, Francesco Berlinghieri printed the first edition in vernacular Italian. The edition published in Strasbourg in 1513 was a major step in the modernization of the Geography. It preserved the corpus of Ptolemy's text and maps as faithfully as possible to the original while it provided a separate set of 20 more accurate and up-to-date modern maps. A much improved Latin translation of the Greek original was produced by Willibald Pirckheimer for the 1525 Strasbourg edition, and the first printed edition directly in Greek was authored by Erasmus of Rotterdam in Basel in 1533.
Ptolemy had mapped the whole world from the Fortunatae Insulae eastward to the eastern shore of the Magnus Sinus. This known portion of the world was comprised within 180 degrees. In his extreme east Ptolemy placed Serica, the Sinarum Situs, and the emporium of Cattigara. On the 1489 map of the world by Henricus Martellus, which was based on Ptolemy's work, Asia terminated in its southeastern point in a cape, the Cape of Cattigara. Cattigara was understood by Ptolemy to be a port on the Sinus Magnus, or Great Gulf, the actual Gulf of Thailand, at eight and a half degrees north of the Equator, on the coast of Cambodia, which is where he located it in his Canon of Famous Cities. It was the easternmost port reached by shipping trading from the Graeco-Roman world to the lands of the Far East.
In Ptolemy's later and better-known Geography, a scribal error was made and Cattigara was located at eight and a half degrees South of the Equator. On Ptolemaic maps, such as that of Martellus, Catigara was located on the easternmost shore of the Mare Indicum, 180 degrees East of the Cape St Vincent at, due to the scribal error, eight and a half degrees South of the Equator.
Catigara is also shown at this location on Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 world map, which avowedly followed the tradition of Ptolemy. Ptolemy's information was thereby misinterpreted so that the coast of China, which should have been represented as part of the coast of eastern Asia, was falsely made to represent an eastern shore of the Indian Ocean. As a result, Ptolemy implied more land east of the 180th meridian and an ocean beyond. Marco Polo’s account of his travels in eastern Asia described lands and seaports on an eastern ocean apparently unknown to Ptolemy. Marco Polo’s narrative authorized the extensive additions to the Ptolemaic map shown on the 1492 globe of Martin Behaim. The fact that Ptolemy did not represent an eastern coast of Asia made it admissible for Behaim to extend that continent far to the east. Behaim’s globe placed Marco Polo’s Mangi and Cathay east of Ptolemy’s 180th meridian, and the Great Khan’s capital, Cambaluc, on the 41st parallel of latitude at approximately 233 degrees East. Behaim allowed 60 degrees beyond Ptolemy’s 180 degrees for the mainland of Asia and 30 degrees more to the east coast of Cipangu. Cipangu and the mainland of Asia were thus placed only 90 and 120 degrees, respectively, west of the Canary Islands.
The Codex Seragliensis was used as the base of a new edition of the work in 2006. This new edition was used to "decode" Ptolemy's coordinates of Books 2 and 3 by an interdisciplinary team of TU Berlin, presented in publications in 2010 and 2012.

Influence on Christopher Columbus

modified this geography further by using Italian nautical miles as the length of a degree instead of the longer degree of Ptolemy, and by adopting Marinus of Tyre’s longitude of 225 degrees for the east coast of the Magnus Sinus. This resulted in a considerable eastward advancement of the longitudes given by Martin Behaim and other contemporaries of Columbus. By some process Columbus reasoned that the longitudes of eastern Asia and Cipangu respectively were about 270 and 300 degrees east, or 90 and 60 degrees west of the Canary Islands. He said that he had sailed 1100 leagues from the Canaries when he found Cuba in 1492. This was approximately where he thought the coast of eastern Asia would be found. On this basis of calculation he identified Hispaniola with Cipangu, which he had expected to find on the outward voyage at a distance of about 700 leagues from the Canaries. His later voyages resulted in further exploration of Cuba and in the discovery of South and Central America. At first South America, the Mundus Novus was considered to be a great island of continental proportions; but as a result of his fourth voyage, it was apparently considered to be identical with the great Upper India peninsula represented by Behaim – the Cape of Cattigara. This seems to be the best interpretation of the sketch map made by Alessandro Zorzi on the advice of Bartholomew Columbus around 1506, which bears an inscription saying that according to the ancient geographer Marinus of Tyre and Christopher Columbus the distance from Cape St Vincent on the coast of Portugal to Cattigara on the peninsula of India Superior was 225 degrees, while according to Ptolemy the same distance was 180 degrees.

Early modern Ottoman Empire

Prior to the 16th century, knowledge of geography in the Ottoman Empire was limited in scope, with almost no access to the works of earlier Islamic scholars that superseded Ptolemy. His Geography would again be translated and updated with commentary into Arabic under Mehmed II, who commissioned works from Byzantine scholar George Amiroutzes in 1465 and the Florentine humanist Francesco Berlinghieri in 1481.

Longitudes error and Earth size

There are two related errors:

Considering a sample of 80 cities amongst the 6345 listed by Ptolemy, those that are both identifiable and for which we can expect a better distance measurement since they were well known, there is a systematic overestimation of the longitude by a factor 1.428 with a high confidence. This error produces evident deformations in Ptolemy's world map most apparent for example in the profile of Italy, which is markedly stretched horizontally.
Ptolemy accepted that the known Ecumene spanned 180° of longitude, but instead of accepting Eratosthenes's estimate for the circumference of the Earth of 252,000 stadia, he shrinks it to 180,000 stadia, with a factor of 1.4 between the two figures.

This suggests Ptolemy rescaled his longitude data to fit with a figure of 180,000 stadia for the circumference of the Earth, which he described as a "general consensus". Ptolemy rescaled experimentally obtained data in many of his works on geography, astrology, music, and optics.

Primary sources

;Greek

, hrsg. von Alfred Stückelberger und Gerd Grasshoff
; ; .
, the earliest papyrus fragment of the Table of Noteworthy Cities. Catalogue list entry .
Vatican , the earliest surviving Byzantine manuscript maps of the Geography.

;Latin

, Latin manuscript copied around 1411
, digitized codex made in Italy between 1460 and 1477, translated to Latin by Jacobus Angelus at . Also known as codex valentinus, it is the oldest manuscript of the codices with maps of Ptolemy with the donis projections.
/ Claudius Ptolemaeus. Translated into Latin by Jacobus Angelus, and edited by Nicolaus Germanus. – Ulm : Lienhart Holle. – 1482.
, Basileae apud Henricum Petrum mense Martio anno M. D. XL. .
, Venetiis : apud Vincentium Valgrisium, Venezia, 1562.

;Portuguese

Pedro Nunes, Tratado da Sphera com a Theorica do Sol e da Lua e ho Primeiro Liuro da Geographia de Claudio Ptolomeo Alexãndrino, Oficina de Germão Galharde, Lisboa, 1537.

;Italian

, In Venetia : appresso Gio. Battista et Giorgio Galignani fratelli, 1598.
, In Venetia : appresso gli heredi di Melchior Sessa, 1599.

;English

, with most Greece-related places geolocated, by John Brady Kiesling at
, geo-located .KMZ plots of nearly all points in Non-European regions, Books 4-7, for use in GoogleEarth.

German

2006 Exhibition by Alfred Stückelberger, Florian Mittenhuber and Thomas Klöti

Secondary material

– Selected problems of Ptolemy's Geography of Asia
including a discussion of the Geographia

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