Until the Latin texts of Pomponius Mela’s Chorographia (43 CE) and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Greek scholarship provided the only documentary geographies on the Near East (Mela: Romer 1998; Pliny: cf. Murphy 2004). Historians such as Livy supplied some information, but not as part of a larger geographical project. For most Romans knowledge of Near Eastern geography arrived in the form of triumphal paintings, images including allegorical personifications of conquered cities to topographies, cityscapes, and panoramas depicting notable features or historical narratives of the victorious generals’ expeditions (Nicolet 1991: 69; Holliday 1997: 137ff; Murphy 2004: 154ff). Livy (37.59.3–5) reports that Scipio Asiaticus paraded 134 representations of captured Asian towns (oppidorum simulacra) in his 188 BCE triumph, and in his triumph of 61 BCE Pompey is said to have had inscriptions listing conquered regions and cities from Pontus to Arabia, alongside images (possibly geographical), and a trophy of the entire oikoumenē or orbis terrarum (Plut. Pomp. 45.1–3; Appian Mith. 17.117; Dio 37.21.2). Even Ovid (Ars Am. 1.213–228) recommended explaining the triumphal geographic paintings as an aid to flirtation, listing Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Persia, regions taken in Augustan campaigns, though the allegorical captive Persia was only ever anticipated of Gaius Caesar’s unrealized campaign (Nicolet 1991: 44). Agrippa’s world map was a grandiose version of the triumphal paintings, representing the world now conquered by Roman forces and the oikoumenē subjected to Roman imperium (cf. Holliday 1997: 137). He and his colleagues on the project mapped the world with a system similar to Eratosthenes’s sphragides (see below), using twenty-four regions each with length and width dimensions (Nicolet 1991: 101–102).12
Such displays forcefully communicated the message of Roman dominance, which geographical theorists now had to accommodate in their conception of the world and its physical and political forces. Clarke proposed Polybius, Posidonius, and Strabo as the three Hellenistic geographers who led their field in writing philosophical geography to fit the new political reality (Clarke 1999: 193; also Nicolet 1991: 47, on Strabo’s “intentions”). Roman claims to global domination persisted in political and geographical discourses for several centuries, reflected early on in Polybius’s remarks (3.59.3–4) on Roman conquests and the expansion of geographical knowledge. He credits Alexander’s empire with knowledge of Asia, and Romans with everywhere else, an assertion based more on Roman primacy throughout the oikoumenē than actual possession of it (Nicolet 1991: 30–31). Later in the first centuries BCE and CE there emerged a notion that in conquest and knowledge of the Near East Rome succeeded the four “world” empires: Assyria, Media, Persia, and Macedonia, although recognition of the rival Parthians complicated that picture.13 Strabo and Pliny the Elder represent the solidification of the Roman geopolitics: both describe the oikoumene in a circuit around the Mediterranean with Rome at the physical and allegorical center, much as the Peutinger Table’s source later depicted (Nicolet 1991: 172–173, 192–194; Clarke 1999: 210ff; Murphy 2004: 132ff).
Cartographical Disputes
In a field handling data on individual places, regions, the oikoumenē, and the entire globe, the sources differ according to scale: as topographies, chorographies, or geographies (Romer 1998: 4–5). By the Hellenistic period geographers distinguished between the world and the oikoumenē, and Crates of Mallos even suggested that the globe was divided into four equal zones, each with its own inhabited region, only one of which was so far known (the oikoumenē).14 Within the oikoumenē, further mathematical divisions were employed for measurements, cartography, and identifying regions. Eratosthenes projected the world map as a series of quadrilaterals, what he called sphragides (“seals”). Each sphragis covered a significant region – India was the first, Ariana the second, the Near East the third, and Arabia and western Africa the fourth (Strabo 2.1.22; Harley et al. 1987: 157). The astronomer Hipparchus (fl. 162–126 BCE) criticized certain of Eratosthenes’s calculations, but not the overall scheme. For example, he corrected (Hipparchus fr. 26) the fourth sphragis by triangulating the distances between Babylon, Pelusium, and Thapsacus on the north Euphrates with updated latitudes for each city (Nicolet 1991: 62). Strabo (2.1.36) criticized Hipparchus’s geometrical method, declaring it too rigid, for example when Hipparchus disputes Eratosthenes’s distance from Thapsacus to Babylon after he had explicitly stated that it followed the course of the Euphrates and was not a straight line.
An ongoing dispute among geographers concerned the Caspian Sea. Herodotus (1.203; cf. Aristotle de Meteor. 362b11 for later agreement) said it was landlocked, because he preferred the evidence of explorers’ reports over Milesian theories of the encircling Ocean (Romm 1992: 34–35). Strabo, being a staunch Stoic, prioritized Homeric veracity and so argued for the older view: that the Caspian connected to Ocean (2.5.31, 11.1.5, 6.1–2 and 11.6.3: Homer and Hesiod better than Ctesias, Herodotus, and Hellanicus; cf. Romm 1992: 42–43, 192). Thus he could describe sea trade between India, Babylon, and the Caspian (11.5.8), even though the entrance to this northern “gulf” lay in the uninhabited world (11.6.1–2). This theory had the advantage of a neat geometry with the other three gulfs, which were also long with narrow entrances – the Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Persian Gulf – having a nice symmetric balance with the Persian Gulf (Strabo 2.5.18; cf. Roseman 2005: 36).
Geographical discrepancies also arose from the use of source material dating to different periods, and the descriptions of Phoenicia and neighboring regions inland are one important example. The Greeks called the inland area north of Judaea and south of the Libanus (Lebanon) mountains Koile Syria, or “Hollow Syria.” Ctesias (FGrH 688 F1b), Pseudo-Skylax (§104.3 (Shipley)), and Hecataeus of Abdera (FGrH 264 F25) used the term, which, as Strabo (16.2.21) explains, refers specifically to the valley between the Libanus and Anti-Libanus mountains (cf. Murphy 2004: 152 on Pliny HN 5.77). Yet Koile Syria’s borders changed when it was contested by the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms, and for Polybius (5.80.3) it stretched as far south as Raphia (cf. Strabo 16.2.21 for the larger borders; cf. also Pomponius Mela §62 for variable names). Political changes generated shifts in geography, and texts such as Strabo’s (16.2.2) record the Hellenistic and Roman geographical situations over time, showing how borders and city names changed (Safrai 2005). Sartre has even argued that Koile Syria existed only in geographers’ imaginations and not the real world (1988). Strabo’s description of the Syrian region (16.2.4–10) is a chronological and ethnological hotch-potch of foundation legends, local verdure and riverine traffic, Hellenistic royal affairs, tales of robbers and rebels, and Parthian and Roman encounters.
The Place of Ethnography
The place of historical change within geography, to the extent that many periods may be merged in one source, means that geographical sources provide historical information for the Near East and its many political changes. Regional geographies also show continuity of traditional descriptions or tropes about certain Near Eastern places and peoples. For the Greeks and Romans, foreign lands were identified by their inhabitants, and those peoples were distinguished by memorable facts and cultural curiosities.15 The bematists included ethnographies in their itineraries, and Athenaeus (10.59) only quotes Baiton and Amyntas because they described the Tapuroi of Aria as very fond of wine, and Ctesias had earlier reported the same (FGrH 688 F54 = Ath. 10.59). Strabo (11.9.1) mentions that “historians,” perhaps the bematists, reported that the Tapuroi customarily surrendered their wives to other men.16 Commentary on food consumption and marital habits appears in Agatharchides’s chorography of the Red Sea, in which he describes (fr. 31a, 34b, 37a, b (Burstein)) the cooking methods, procreative customs, and capacity for drink among the Fish-eaters of the Arabian Gulf. Aelius Gallus ventured deeper into Arabia than Gaius Caesar and Juba had managed and so reported back that the tribes there produced