Dueck Daniela. Geography in Classical Antiquity

With a chapter by Kai Brodersen. — Cambridge University Press, 2012. — 158 p.What were the limits of knowledge of the physical world in Greek and Roman antiquity? How far did travellers reach and what did they know about far-away regions? How did they describe foreign countries and peoples? How did they measure the earth, and distances and heights upon it? Did they use maps? Ideas about the physical and cultural world are the key to understanding ancient history, but until now there has been no up-to-date introduction to ancient geography. Employing a variety of sources – philosophical and scientific texts, poems and travelogues, papyri and visual evidence – this book explores the origins and development of geographical ideas in classical antiquity and the techniques for describing landscape, topography and ethnography.Daniela Dueck is a Senior Lecturer in the Departments of History and Classical Studies at Bar Ilan University. She is the author of Strabo of Amasia: A Greek Man of Letters in Augustan Rome (2000) and co-editor (with Hugh Lindsay and Sarah Pothecary) of Strabo’s Cultural Geography: The Making of a Kolossourgia (2005). She is interested in ancient geography and ethnography and is currently conducting a research project on geographical fragments supported by the Israel Science Foundation.Kai Brodersen is President of the University of Erfurt and holds the Chair of Ancient Culture. He has published extensively on classical inscriptions, oracles and paradoxography and on Greek and Roman historiography, geography and cartography.