Book review of Tolias, Mapping Greece, 1420-1800 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cartography-in Companion to Mediterranean History ed Horden and Konoshita
A Companion to Mediterranan History, 2014
Chapter twelve: Maps illustrating the Mediterranean Sea that have been preserved today from antiquity and the medieval period were not intended to be used as a modern map might be. For the most part, they were theological maps, or historical narratives, or entertainments, or plans for dreams of ambitious rulers. In other words, these early maps provided visuality to larger schemes of power and position. It was not until the rise of portolans that maps reflected maritime travel narratives, and, even then, most extant portolans are vivid and highly decorative statements of power and dominion and not guides for sailors. As such, they, like all maps from the earliest examples to Google Earth, have a great deal to tell us about the way the world-or in this case the Mediterranean-was conceived in political as well as practical terms. Although the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy (d. c. 168 Ce) composed a detailed and technical book on world maps, with instructions for various methods of projection, the only actual maps associated with his treatise are in fact late Byzantine or Renaissance reconstructions. For that reason, we are unable to say what a secondcentury Ptolemaic map would have looked like. 1 For many Latin map makers, the Mediterranean was simply a line demarcating Europe from the other two continents. This is evident, for example, in the so-called TO maps, where the known world is shown surrounded by a circular sea (the 'O' of the maps) and divided into three continents by the T, whose 'leg' is the Mediterranean Sea separating Africa and Europe. The horizontal bar of the T represents two rivers: the River Nile and the River Don (see Figure 12.1). These abstract maps reflect a cartographic tradition probably going back to ancient Rome, preserved today as illustrations in ninth-century and later copies of the histories of Sallust (86-34 bCe) and a poem on the civil war between Pompey and Caesar composed by Lucan (39-65 Ce)
Proceedings of the 1st TIR-FOR Symposium. From Territory Studies to Digital Cartography, 2021
The Tabula Imperii Romani project, as the name indicates, began as a map. However, due to the vast amount of archaeological data produced by numerous excavations in the areas of the Roman Empire, TIR volumes were converted into gazetteers. Maps gradually became a mere supplement to this index. More recently, with the aid of GIS mapping and databases, maps have regained importance. The Academy of Athens has participated in the TIR project since 1972. The first volume (Philippi) was published in 1993. Over the last decade, an intense effort has been made to publish volumes devoted to the entire area of Greece. Six new volumes are now available, covering the area from Epirus and Thessaly to Attica and the Aegean Islands. The TIR-Greece research group is currently exploring new ways of presenting and analysing archaeological, historical and spatial data. The first example of this process covers western Greece (Aitolia-Akarnania and Epirus). In this paper, we present changes in settlement patterns in western Greece after the Roman conquest and we attempt to address historical issues, such as the impact of the Roman presence on the area.
2011
Rigas Velestinlis (1757-1798) is a major representative of the Greek Enlightenment in the late 18 century. Among Rigas’ works, writings and translations, his cartographic production though limited in number of maps, is of particular importance. Especially his masterpiece, the Charta, a 12-sheet 2X2 metres map in ca. 1:600.000 scale, printed in Vienna (1796–1797), representing Southeast Europe (the Balkan peninsula), is now considered an officially declared monument of Greek cultural heritage. Three years later (1800), also in Vienna, another great personality of the Greek Enlightenment, Anthimos Gazis (1758-1828), the scholar parish priest of Vienna’s Greek-Orthodox Church of St George, published his own map of Greece, the Pinax, a 4-sheet, 1X1 m. map, in ca. 1:1.200.000 scale, representing the same geographic area as in Charta. Even though in the relevant bibliography, Pinax is considered a “new edition” of Rigas’ Charta, it is actually an entirely different map. Despite its histor...