"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 economic,
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 none 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.
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