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 The Iberian Peninsula in Ptolemy’s Geography Olivier Defaux Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. © Edition Topoi / Exzellenzcluster Topoi der Freien Universität Berlin und der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Typographic concept and cover design: Stephan Fiedler Printed and distributed by PRO BUSINESS digital printing Deutschland GmbH, Berlin ISBN ---- ISSN (Print) - ISSN (Online) -X URN urn:nbn:de:kobv:--/- First published Published under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC . DE. Images with attached copyright notices mark third party content and are not available for use under the CC license terms. www.edition-topoi.de CONTENTS Preface — 9 Introduction — 11 Signs and abbreviations — 15 Ptolemy and the Geography — 21 . Ptolemy: astronomer, astrologer and geographer — 21 . Structure of Ptolemy’s Geography — 36 . Geographical coordinates — 41 . Ptolemy’s map projections — 49 Textual tradition of the Geography — 57 . The Geography’s transmission: status quæstionis — 57 . The recensions in Book of the Geography and the Handy Tables — 81 . Secondary traditions and the recensions of the Geography — 91 . Formal and textual specificity of the catalogue — 115 The catalogue of the Iberian peninsula and the recensions of the Geography — 127 . Structure of the Iberian peninsula’s catalogue — 127 . Toponyms and ethnonyms of Iberia — 135 . Coordinates and numerical readings — 146 . Textual organisation and spatial ordering of the catalogue — 152 Sources and methods in the introduction to the Geography — 163 . Ptolemy’s epistemology of a geographical science — 163 . Determining latitude and longitude: theory and application — 169 . Origins of the coordinates and the revision of Marinus’ work — 177 . Distance, time and orientation — 185 . Sources on the latitude of localities — 188 . Sources on the longitude of localities — 193 . Maps and pictorial representations — 197 . Administrative documents — 209 The Iberian peninsula in antique sources — 211 . Ptolemy and the geography of the Iberian peninsula — 212 . General descriptions of the oikoumenē — 213 . Iberia in the corpus of periplographical texts — 224 . Itinerary sources and the peninsula’s antique roads — 233 . Historical works — 239 Identifying and explaining the origins of the Geography’s coordinates — 245 . Origins of Ptolemy’s catalogue in modern research works — 245 . Methodological requirements — 255 . Identifying and locating Ptolemy’s toponyms — 260 The main coastal distortions explained — 271 . Iberia’s Mediterranean coast — 271 . Southern oceanic coast of Iberia and the Strait of Hercules — 291 . Western and northern coasts of Iberia — 311 The localised coastal distortions explained — 323 . Distortions related to the coastline in the Ξ recension — 323 . How the coastal localities were positioned — 346 . Coordinates of the islands — 356 . Distortions in the Ω recension — 366 The Iberian interior’s distortions — 375 . Castulo and the group of distortions around Baetica — 376 . Tarraconensis and Lusitania — 387 Conclusion — 409 Appendices — 415 Sources and Editions — 429 Bibliography — 435 Index of Persons — 461 Index of Places — 465 Preface This book is the result of a three-year doctoral research project that was conducted be- tween February and January within research area D (Group D- ‘Space of Nature’) of the Excellence Cluster EXC Topoi, Berlin. Group D- was devoted to the study of the natural sciences and their development in Antiquity, and was led by Gerd Graßhoff and Mathieu Ossendrijver. The thesis was part of a doctoral programme (History of Ancient Science) offered by the Berlin Graduate School of Ancient Studies and was funded by a research grant awarded by the Excellence Cluster Topoi. The present study on Ptolemy’s Geography is part of a long-term research project ini- tiated by the Ptolemy Research Unit of the University of Bern, Switzerland, which gave rise to the edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, and the Ancient Cartography project of the university’s former Karman Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. It is thanks to these two projects that the research material and the scientific basis for further studies of Ptolemy’s Geography were updated and strengthened, thereby considerably influencing my work. I owe thanks to a great many people without whom this thesis would not have been possible. First of all, I am indebted to Gerd Graßhoff for having given me the oppor- tunity to carry out this project; his guidance and steadfast support were greatly appre- ciated. Special thanks go to Elisabeth Rinner for providing me with substantial and crucial technical assistance, and to Mathieu Ossendrijver for his help and support. I am also deeply grateful to Pascal Arnaud and Jehan Desanges for their early encouragement and help, and to all my colleagues at the Excellence Cluster Topoi, especially Anette Schomberg, Émilie Villey and Fabio Guidetti, as well as to members of the administra- tion and fellow doctoral and postdoctoral students for their day-to-day support and for the many stimulating and enriching discussions we shared. In addition, I would like to thank Carmen Marcks-Jacobs, coordinator for Humboldt University students at the Berlin Graduate School of Ancient Studies, and Roberto Lo Presti, History of Ancient Science programme coordinator, for the assistance they gave me on the doctoral pro- gramme. My thanks go also to members of the Edition Topoi team, especially Nadine ’ Riedl, Nicola Gaedicke, Anne Landskron and Dominika Szafraniec for organising the publication of this book, Ruti Ungar for her careful proofreading, as well as to Anca Dan, Klaus Geus, Leif Isaksen, Didier Marcotte and Anne Tihon for their sound advice and expertise on many subjects. I am especially indebted to Margareta Simons for her painstaking editing, kindness and patience. Finally, I would like to extend my heart- felt gratitude to my family and friends – in France, Germany and elsewhere – for their unfailing support and encouragement. Olivier Defaux Introduction In the minds of many modern scholars, Ptolemy’s Geography, which was written in the second century of the Common Era (CE), is a document that provides almost direct access to the known world of his time. It acts as a portal to the Roman Empire at the height of its power – the world of Trajan, Hadrian and Antoninus – to its countries with their numerous cities and harbours, crossed by roads, bridges and aqueducts, to oceans sailed, as far as the British Isles in the west and China in the east, taking Rome’s greatness well beyond the frontiers of the Imperium. Above all, Ptolemy’s maps allow us to indulge in our fantasies. There is a strong tendency to project on to Ptolemy some of our modern geographical and cartograph- ical practices: historians like to find in Ptolemy’s Geography a pictorial representation of the Antonine world, while archaeologists are oen tempted to use his data to redis- cover lost or forgotten cities. The incredible modernity of Ptolemy’s approach is surely responsible for these temptations. Ptolemy developed new ways of drawing a globe on to a plane surface and he proposed a method for determining the position of any place on Earth by the means of measuring instruments and by making celestial observations. Most importantly of all, though, he was the first to arrange, in a unique table, the ge- ographical coordinates (the longitude and latitude) of several thousand localities, from the most prestigious Mediterranean cities to obscure tributaries flowing through the lands of Scythia. In the foreword to her book on the second-century geographer, Germaine Au- jac wrote that ‘Ptolemy is an author about whom much is said but who one rarely reads’.1 This regrettable state of affairs was rectified aer the publication of the English transla- tion of parts of Ptolemy’s Geography by J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones in and the critical edition of the entire Greek text of the work, edited by Alfred Stückel- berger and Gerd Graßhoff, in , both of which gave rise to a formidable number of publications in a relatively short period of time. More than twenty years aer Aujac 1 Aujac (first edition ), : ‘Ptolémée est un auteur dont on parle beaucoup, mais qu’on lit peu.’ ’ made this statement, one can now rightly say that Ptolemy is an author about whom much has been written, although his work remains poorly understood. The principal objective of this study is to redefine Ptolemy’s Geography as a historical source of the second century CE in order to improve our understanding of its specificity and to draw attention to how mathematical geography was practised in Antiquity. As long as the latter issue remains unresolved, all modern attempts to interpret or uncover the antique oikoumenē, that is, the then known world from the Geography are likely to fail. Ptolemy was the heir to the geography practised by Eratosthenes and Hipparchus during the Hellenistic period.