The Iberian Peninsula in Ptolemy’s Geography: Origins of the Coordinates and Textual History

Description

Claudius Ptolemy composed his "Geography" in the city of Alexandria, one of the most prominent intellectual centres of the Roman Empire. His work offers a comprehensive description of the known world as well as insight into the practice of scholarly geography during the second century CE. Ptolemy's most important innovation in this field was his use of geographical coordinates to create maps of the world, and his catalogue, with its latitudes and longitudes of thousands of localities, is one of our most valuable sources on the antique "oikoumene". Very little is known, however, about the sources and working methods that Ptolemy employed to produce his "Geography". This book focuses on Ptolemy's description of the Iberian peninsula and examines two problematic and interlinked topics relating to the origins of the catalogue of localities: Ptolemy's sources and scientific methods on the one hand, and the textual transmission of the "Geography", from Ptolemy to the extant manuscripts, on the other. Preface 9 Introduction 11 Signs and abbreviations 15 1. Ptolemy and the "Geography" 21 1.1. Ptolemy: astronomer, astrologer and geographer 21 1.2. Structure of Ptolemy's "Geography" 36 1.3. Geographical coordinates 41 1.4. Ptolemy's map projections 49 2. Textual tradition of the "Geography" 57 2.1. The "Geography’s" transmission: 'status quæstionis' 57 2.2. The recensions in Book 8 of the "Geography" and the "Handy Tables" 81 2.3. Secondary traditions and the recensions of the "Geography" 91 2.4. Formal and textual specificity of the catalogue 115 3. The catalogue of the Iberian peninsula and the recensions of the "Geography" 127 3.1. Structure of the Iberian peninsula's catalogue 127 3.2. Toponyms and ethnonyms of Iberia 135 3.3. Coordinates and numerical readings 146 3.4. Textual organisation and spatial ordering of the catalogue 152 4. Sources and methods in the introduction to the "Geography" 163 4.1. Ptolemy's epistemology of a geographical science 163 4.2. Determining latitude and longitude: theory and application 169 4.3. Origins of the coordinates and the revision of Marinus' work 177 4.4. Distance, time and orientation 185 4.5. Sources on the latitude of localities 188 4.6. Sources on the longitude of localities 193 4.7. Maps and pictorial representations 197 4.8. Administrative documents 209 5. The Iberian peninsula in antique sources 211 5.1. Ptolemy and the geography of the Iberian peninsula 212 5.2. General descriptions of the 'oikoumenē' 213 5.3. Iberia in the corpus of periplographical texts 224 5.4. Itinerary sources and the peninsula's antique roads 233 5.5. Historical works 239 6. Identifying and explaining the origins of the "Geography's" coordinates 245 6.1. Origins of Ptolemy's catalogue in modern research works 245 6.2. Methodological requirements 255 6.3. Identifying and locating Ptolemy's toponyms 260 7. The main coastal distortions explained 271 7.1. Iberia's Mediterranean coast 271 7.2. Southern oceanic coast of Iberia and the Strait of Hercules 291 7.3. Western and northern coasts of Iberia 311 8. The localised coastal distortions explained 323 8.1. Distortions related to the coastline in the Ξ recension 323 8.2. How the coastal localities were positioned 346 8.3. Coordinates of the islands 356 8.4. Distortions in the Ω recension 366 9. The Iberian interior's distortions 375 9.1. Castulo and the group of distortions around Baetica 376 9.2. Tarraconensis and Lusitania 387 Conclusion 409 Appendices 415 Sources and Editions 429 Bibliography 435 Index of Persons 461 Index of Places 465