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 ecomic, 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 ne 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.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
University of Chicago Press, The University of Chicago Press
ISBN-10
0226789373
ISBN-13
9780226789378
eBay Product ID (ePID)
129055467
Product Key Features
Format
Hardback
Language
English
Subject
Ancient History
Dimensions
Height
254mm
Width
178mm
Additional Product Features
Place of Publication
Chicago, IL
Edited by
Richard J. A. Talbert
Series Title
The Kenneth Nebenzahl Jr. Lectures in the History of Cartography
Content Note
9 Colour Plates, 82 Halftones, 34 Line Drawings, 2 Tables
Author Biography
Richard J. A. Talbert is the William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of History and Classics and the founder of the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World and Rome's World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered.