The Iberian Peninsula in Ptolemy’s Geography
Olivier Defaux
BERLIN STUDIES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD composed his Geography in the city of Alexandria, one of the most prominent intellec- tual centres of the Roman Empire. His work o ers a comprehensive description of the known world as well as insight into the practice of scholarly geography dur- ing the second century CE. Ptolemy’s most important innovation in this fi eld was his use of geographical co- ordinates to create maps of the world, and his catalogue, with its latitudes and longitudes of thousands of locali- ties, is one of our most valuable sources on the antique oikoumenē. Very little is known, however, about the sources and working methods that Ptolemy employed to produce his Geography. This book focuses on Ptole- my’s description of the Iberian peninsula and examines two problematic and interlinked topics relating to the origins of the catalogue of localities: Ptolemy’s sources and scientifi c methods on the one hand, and the textual transmission of the Geography, from Ptolemy to the extant manuscripts, on the other. 51 · 51