Ancient Perspectives : Maps and Their Place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome - Richard J. A. Talbert

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Ancient Perspectives

Maps and Their Place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome

By: Richard J. A. Talbert (Editor)

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Hardcover | 14 November 2012 | Edition Number 1

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Ancient Perspectives encompasses a vast arc of space and time—Western Asia to North Africa and Europe from the third millennium BCE to the fifth century CE—to explore mapmaking and worldviews in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In each society, maps served as critical economic, political, and personal tools, but there was little consistency in how and why they were made. Much like today, maps in antiquity meant very different things to different people.

Ancient Perspectives presents an ambitious, fresh overview of cartography and its uses. The seven chapters range from broad-based analyses of mapping in Mesopotamia and Egypt to a close focus on Ptolemy’s ideas for drawing a world map based on the theories of his Greek predecessors at Alexandria. The remarkable accuracy of Mesopotamian city-plans is revealed, as is the creation of maps by Romans to support the proud claim that their emperor’s rule was global in its reach. By probing the instruments and techniques of both Greek and Roman surveyors, one chapter seeks to uncover how their extraordinary planning of roads, aqueducts, and tunnels was achieved. Even though none of these civilizations devised the means to measure time or distance with precision, they still conceptualized their surroundings, natural and man-made, near and far, and felt the urge to record them by inventive means that this absorbing volume reinterprets and compares.

Industry Reviews

"Ancient Perspectives does not simply revise the last comprehensive, but largely traditional, study of early European and west Asian cartography in the light of the latest research, discoveries, and debates; for the first time, it puts what survives of early Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman maps and related artifacts into their very different wider cultural contexts and reveals the diverse roles played by the maps in their very different societies. These roles often run counter to traditional assumptions and yet, in some respects, seem strangely familiar. Not the least achievements of the book are that they succeed in weaving the notoriously fragmentary surviving evidence into such a sophisticated, nuanced, persuasive, thorough, and convincing whole and that the book does so in language that is crystal clear and free of jargon. It represents scholarly communication at its very best."
--Peter Barber, British Library
"Edited and introduced masterfully by Richard J. A. Talbert, [Ancient Perspectives] contains must-read essays for all those interested in the history of these earliest forms of cartography. . . . A truly wonderful read, and with its updated research and bibliography, [it] certainly represents one of most important additions to the scholarship on ancient cartography published in recent years. I could not recommend it more."--John Hessler, Library of Congress "Portolan"
"I recommend Ancient Perspectives highly."--Judith A. Tyner, California State University, Long Beach "Geographical Reviews"

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Preface	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
The Expression of Terrestrial and Celestial Order in Ancient Mesopotamia	p. 9
From Topography to Cosmos: Ancient Egypt's Multiple Maps	p. 47
Mapping the World: Greek Initiatives from Homer to Eratosthenes	p. 81
Ptolemy's Geography: Mapmaking and the Scientific Enterprise	p. 109
Greek and Roman Surveying and Surveying Instruments	p. 129
Urbs Roma to Orbis Romanics: Roman Mapping on the Grand Scale	p. 163
Putting the World in Order: Mapping in Roman Texts	p. 193
Bibliography	p. 235
Contributors	p. 251
Index	p. 253
Plates 1-3 follow page	p. 38
Plates 4-p follow page	p. 150
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Ancient Perspectives

Maps and Their Place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome

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