Europa in der Geographie des Ptolemaios: Die Entschlüsselung des "Atlas Oikumene": Zwischen Orkney, Gibraltar und den Dinariden Hardcover – 1 March 2012

Schnelle Lieferung und sehr gute Qualität.

Three authors based in Berlin have sorted out how to convert Ptolemy's latitude and longitude coordinates into their modern equivalents and therefore how to match up ancient names with ancient places. This is the second volume of two, dealing with Britain plus most of the western Roman Empire outside greater Germany. Excellent work, but any reader interested in British places needs to watch out for various points:1. The names are shown in Latin transliterations, not Ptolemy's actual Greek, which can obscure subtle nuances of likely meaning.2. The text is (of course) all in German, which can be hard work to read.3. Modern UK place names are sometimes subtly mis-spelled.4. Many ancient names are assigned to their traditionally expected places. Necessary, of course, to establish a base of data for the analysis, in order to position the mysterious names. But some of those assignments are actually highly questionable.5. Scotland in particular was a real problem in Ptolemy's work. For places there you need to go to a later paper published by Marx alone, which is available online. Some place assignments there overrule the book, but without always making that point clear.Don't let these quibbles put you off. This book is an absolute must-have for specialists in Roman-era history.