Archaeologists find western world\'s oldest map

[tlclark]

Just had to get into this discussion since it relates to my dissertation.

If this map is genuinely a spatial map it's a VERY big deal. When most people think of geographies, they think of maps, but in the ancient world nearly all ancient geographies have no actual maps, or no evidence that they ever had maps. Instead what they provided were long lists ( literally "katalogia" ) of coordinates and distances.

In theory, anyone with a copy of Ptolemy's Geographica could draw an accurate map based on Ptolemy's tables.

What's funny is that there is far more evidence for actual star maps in antiquity than for maps of the earth. In a way, that's natural. The sky is easy to see, it's much harder to see and map the earth from the ground!

Whether claudius ptolemy had an actual map to work from or not is still a matter of huge debate. Personally I think that he only had rudimentary drawings if anything. It's obvious that he was working from a system of coordinates. Whenever you see a "map" from Ptlomey or Strabo it is actually medieval or later in origin.

There is a huge shift in perceptual thinking from the ancient world to the Medieval. Scientific illustration, or any diagrams of any kind are virtually unknown, but then something happens, and then there are maps literally everywhere.

Finding the moment when this happens is something of a holy grail of mine. My own take on this is that Cosmas Indicopleustes' Christian Topography, is far more critical in the mind-shift than previously thought.

Travis