CHAPTER 3 Geographical Sources and Documents
Gillian Ramsey
The geographical sources for the Hellenistic and Roman Near East available today are Strabo’s Geography, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Ptolemy’s Geography, itineraries, Periploi (“circumnavigations”), a collection of minor geographies from medieval manuscripts, sections of historical works, and fragments of geographical texts collected from quotations in Strabo and others. These texts convey a rich body of ancient knowledge and speculation about Near Eastern geography, based on the changing interests of given periods and drawing upon a long history of travel to and curiosity about the Near East. People acquired and shared information about places, climates, travel routes, commodities, and habits of living through practical experience, oral communication, and texts, of which some are lost and others survive for study today. Geographical sources were not in total agreement about what lay east of the Mediterranean, and the task of collating and comparing different accounts faced ancient writers just as it does historians today. It is very clear that Strabo, for one, used many sources for his writing. Pliny the Elder was helpful enough to list his sources in the introduction to his Natural History (1.5b–c), and a glance at his bibliography for book 5 – which covers Near Eastern geography – reveals the scope of material he had on hand for his research: Augustus’s right-hand man Agrippa tops the list of Roman authorities, while foreign sources include Hecataeus, Dicaearchus, Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Polybius, Herodotus, and Eudoxus.
The Greco-Roman textual tradition of Near Eastern geography divides into practical geography, the distances and topographia (description of places, topoi) useful to people on the ground, and philosophical geographia (description of the world, gē), discussions and calculations aimed at explaining the entire known world (the oikoumenē). These two types of geography were closely related. Practical geographies supplied empirical data essential to the theoreticians’ hypotheses, while philosophers provided a worldview that directed practical geographers in their measurements and descriptions. The guiding aim of philosophical geographies was both scientific and political: to explain how the dimensions and details of the world conformed to the reasoned and observed laws of nature and human activity. The earliest (sixth to fourth centuries BCE) written geographies of the Near East show this tendency, providing topographical information that helped educated Greek audiences better understand the Persian Empire as a geopolitical rival within a Hellenocentric world geography (Nicolet 1991: 5–6; Harrison 2007: 55). The priorities and methods of geographical writers changed depending on their intellectual and political contexts, for example when Rome became the dominant power. Not only was geography culturally embedded as a literary form, but its frame of reference, from units of measure to place names to concepts of landscape and space, varied according to author and period.
Alexander the Great – and after him the Hellenistic kings and Roman generals and emperors – drove geographical exploration with their military expeditions. The logistics of moving armies around the Near East and beyond required extensive research of extant geographies, as well as new surveys and intelligence gathering in the field, combining the technical know-how of professional surveyors and consultation of local guides (Engels 1980: 328–329). The sources emerging out of these activities are practical itineraries and surveys, generally now in fragmentary form, which provided the source material for the Alexander historians, Eratosthenes, Polybius, Strabo, and Pliny. The actual geographical information contained in these texts tends to be the locations of major settlements, distances between them, the cultural distinctions of the native inhabitants, and any important stories associated with them. Writers like Strabo fitted this material into a more philosophical structure, but the raw data, as collected by the surveyors under royal patronage, retains its original flavor. Later, the desire to obtain knowledge of Parthian domains and access to the lucrative Arabian and Indian Ocean trade network prompted Augustus and emperors after him to send expeditions. After the Hellenistic settlement of Greeks throughout the Near East, civilian-led enterprise also produced written geographies focusing on regional commodities and trade in addition to the logistic and political information of state commissioned sources (cf. Casson 1989: 8).
Most writers of practical geographies produced not maps, but written versions of oral travel instructions and topographical descriptions. Cartography was the province of the philosophical geographers, particularly those whose specialisms were astronomy and terrestrial phenomena. Such geographical studies had a long history, beginning with Anaximander of Miletos (first half of the sixth century BCE), credited by Diogenes Laertius (2.2) with inventing the sundial and being the first to draw the circumference (perimetron) of the earth and sea (Dilke 1985: 23).1 Successive theoreticians combined personal observations, second-hand reports, celestial and mathematical models, and logical deduction to expand and improve the description of the world, but only a few used actual cartography (Irby 2012). Like the practical geographers, written descriptions dominated their field. Knowledge of the oikoumenē grew after Alexander’s conquests pushed back its horizons. In the third century BCE Eratosthenes – who invented the word geographia (Roller 2010: 1, 12ff) – created a world map representing these new lands, and his summation of the theories about cartographic projection constituted a scientific breakthrough (Dilke 1985: 32–35). Geographers, however, continued to debate with many criticisms, corrections, and controversies over the shape, proportions, and substance of the oikoumenē, and this discourse forms the bulk of Classical geographical writing. Such scholarship continued through late antiquity and led to the creation of several invaluable codices preserving the so-called “Minor Greek Geographers” – one such collection was assembled by Marcianus of Heraclea (sixth century CE) and preserved in the Codex Parisinus supplement grec 443 (Schoff 1927: 9; Diller 1952: 3ff; Shipley 2011: 1).
Practical Geographies
Greek Sources
The Hellenistic soldiers and colonists who ventured into the Near East under Alexander and his Successors entered a not entirely unfamiliar region. Many Greeks had journeyed into Persian territory often in the service of the satraps and kings, such as the Greek mercenaries employed by Cyrus the Younger between 401 and 399 BCE and Ctesias of Cnidus who served as physician in the court of Artaxerxes II Mnemon until 398/7 BCE and wrote histories of Assyria and Persia.2 People returning from Near Eastern travels likely transmitted a good deal of geographical information by word of mouth, and this shaped people’s awareness of Persian territory. Hecataeus of Miletus (fl. 500 BCE) traveled in Asia and Egypt and wrote Periodos Gēs (Circuit of the Earth), alternatively titled Periēgēsis (Guidebook of the Earth), in which he combined information from his travels with the ideas promulgated by the Milesian philosophers.3 This was the first geographical prose text, soon followed by Herodotus’s Histories, which contains several criticisms of earlier methods and results (cf. Hdt. 4.36–42). We know of other early writers of Persian histories (typically entitled Persika), whose works are now fragmentary: Dionysius of Miletus (FGrH 687), Hellanicus of Lesbos (FGrH 687a), and Charon of Lampsacus (FGrH 687b) all wrote in the fifth century, while Heracleides of Cyme (FGrH 689), Deinon of Colophon (FGrH 690), and Ephorus of Cyme (FGrH 70) wrote in the fourth century. Thus at the outset of the Hellenistic period, Greeks, Macedonians, and others from