Ancient Perspectives: Maps and Their Place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome (The Kenneth Nebenzahl Jr. Lectures in the History of Cartography)

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Description

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 within the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In each and every society, maps served as important economic, political, and personal tools, but there was once little consistency in how and why they were made. Similar to these days, 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 focal point on Ptolemy’s ideas for drawing a world map in line with 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 enhance the proud claim that their emperor’s rule was once global in its reach. By probing the instruments and techniques of both Greek and Roman surveyors, one chapter seeks to uncover how their peculiar planning of roads, aqueducts, and tunnels was once 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.


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