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Ptolemy and the Geography of Germania the Most Important

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Ptolemy and the Geography of Germania the Most Important Introduction (translated imperfectly from the book by Kleineberg, Marx, Knobloch and Lelgemann) Ptolemy and the geography of Germania The most important works of ancient literature that give us a picture of ancient Germania are the Germania of Tacitus (around AD 55 to around 120) and the Geographike Hyphegesis of Klaudios Ptolemaios (around 100 to around 170), hereinafter referred to as Geography. While the Roman historian Tacitus concentrated on ethnographic description of the Germanic tribes, the focus of the portrayal by the Greek scholar Ptolemy is cartography. He wrote his Geography in the middle of the second century in Alexandria. This city, founded by Alexander the Great on an estuary of the Nile, was not only a spiritual center of the Greco-Roman world, where Ptolemy had the most important library of antiquity at his disposal (Canfora 2002), but also a trading metropolis where information about all the then known countries of the world, over the oikumene, flowed together. In his geographical work, Ptolemy first describes the theoretical basis for a true-to-scale cartographic representation of the oikumene. In the main part of Geography he then gives the geographic coordinates of more than 6300 locations and topographic points, such as estuaries, foothills, or mountains. A special feature of this catalogue of places is that Ptolemy uses a uniform, global coordinate system that corresponds to today's geographic coordinate system from a prime meridian. Latitudes are counted from the equator, the prime meridian is, as later in the Ferro system, placed at the Canary Islands, the westernmost end of the world known at the time. Degrees are given in the form of the so-called Milesian system, in which the letters of the Greek alphabet are used as numerals. The minute values are shown as fractions of degrees. Since, with the exception of the value 2/3, only fractions with 1 are used as numerators, some values appear as the addition of simple fractions, e.g. 1/2 + 1/4 = 3/4. The smallest fraction of a degree given by Ptolemy in the local catalogue is 1/12; this corresponds to 5'. Since Ptolemy also gives a value of 180,000 stadia for the circumference of the earth (GH VII, 5, 12) and he uses a circle division of 360°, 1° at the equator corresponds to 500 stadia. Ptolemy divides the cartographic representation of the entire oikumene into an overview map and 26 individual maps: ten maps for Europe, four for Africa, and twelve for Asia. Within this structure, the 6300 places mentioned, to which the names of peoples and landscapes appear without coordinates, are distributed over 84 countries or regions, the boundaries of which are described in each case. In the second book of Geography there is Ptolemy’s representation of Germania, i.e. of the settlement area of Germanic tribes that did not belong to the Roman Empire. He calls this area Germania Megale ("Greater Germania", reproduced below in the Latin form Germania Magna). According to Ptolemy, it is bordered by the Rhine in the west, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea in the north, the Danube in the south, and the Vistula and the Western Carpathians in the east. The area of Germania at that time included not only parts of today's Germany, but also parts of Denmark, Poland, Austria, Czechia, and Slovakia. Conversely, today's Germany also includes areas that Ptolemy found in the description of the Roman provinces Raetia and Germania Inferior and Superior, whereby he treated these two Germanic provinces in the description of Gallia Belgica. Noricum, which borders on Raetia to the east and Germania Magna to the south-east, is in present-day Austria. Ptolemy shows us the state of Central Europe in the early Roman Empire. The particularities in the representation of the individual areas are discussed in the present work in the corresponding sections. Not only the Germanic area is dealt with here, but also the adjacent territory of the Roman Empire. Identifying the ancient places Problems with location identification "But only if we succeed in gaining more clarity here, where we can proceed on safe ground, about the sources of Ptolemy, his method in determining the positions and the value of the tradition available to us, it will perhaps still be possible, also to find the key for his portrayal of Germania Magna, which is so immensely important for the prehistory of our fatherland, but still defies research like an enchanted castle." This is how Karl Zangemeister wrote in 1892 and indeed Ptolemy’s representation of Germania Magna must have seemed to him like an“ enchanted castle ”. Because on the one hand Ptolemy gives us the most comprehensive topographical description of Germania of antiquity, on the other hand it was hardly possible to reliably locate even some of the places he mentioned. An expression of this is the abundance of investigations that were carried out with undiminished intensity even after Zangemeister's statement mentioned above, and the large number of often significantly different identification proposals that resulted from this. The three questions named by Zangemeister turned out to be fundamental problems for the identification of the ancient places in Germania Magna: the text transmission, the sources used by Ptolemy, and his method of determining the geographic coordinates. The text transmission The "original copy" of the Geography from the time of Ptolemy no longer exists. The text available today is wholly or partially transmitted through 53 (previously known) Greek manuscripts, the oldest of which were created around 1300 (Burri, pp. 10-20). For more than a millennium, the text transmission has eluded our direct knowledge. (The Rylands papyrus No. 522 from the beginning of the 3rd century is an exception, see Stückelberger / Mittenhuber / Koch, pp. 142-144.) The preserved Greek manuscripts can now be divided into two text variants, the so-called Ω recension and the so-called Ξ recension. The first splits into two subgroups; the latter is only represented by one manuscript (Stüuckelber-Ger / Mittenhüber p. 21 25). In these two recensions, the coordinates differ from each other in well over a thousand cases, so that not inconsiderable differences can arise when locating an ancient place; For example, the place Bicurgtum in Germania Magna has a latitude of 51°15'according to the Ωrecension, and 49° according to the Ξ recension. These deviations may be caused by typographical errors or by modifications of the coordinates, which may have already been made by Ptolemy or by later editors. Last but not least, Ptolemy himself took into account the possibility of later corrections when creating his catalog of places by leaving space accordingly in his tables (GH II. 1. 3). As a rule, however, in cases of deviating coordinates, the mathematical-geodetic analysis methods described in Section 1.2.2 could determine the presumably correct values. In other cases, it turned out that places are roughly incorrectly localized according to the ancient coordinates and none of the traditional interpretations offers a suitable value. On the one hand, Ptolemy may have already found incorrect information about these places. on the other hand, it is possible. that he himself made mistakes in locating them. Of course, numerous possibilities of spelling mistakes on the part of the copyists can also be assumed here, such as mistakes in the transcription from uppercase to lowercase, wrong interpretation of illegible written numbers, slipping in the line, mixing up whole numbers and fractions, forgetting fractions, hearing errors when dictating, etc. As opposed to lexical, orthographic or grammatical errors in a coherent text are, however, more difficult to recognize when writing coordinates. especially since copyists usually do not have the appropriate specialist knowledge to check the correctness of the coordinates. If the assumption arose that the coordinates of a place were corrupted by a typing error, nominal values were calculated based on the distortion analysis of the ancient data, by means of which conjectures could be suggested. As with the coordinates, there may also be discrepancies between the manuscripts or groups of manuscripts or typographical errors in the ancient place names. In addition, there is a fluctuating orthography, e.g. due to iotacism. If these are names that are also covered by other sources, a correction is usually possible. For example, the correct forms Belgike and Vindobona can easily be determined for the obviously incorrectly transmitted names Beltike or Iuliobona. This is especially true for location information within the Roman Empire. With place names that belong to areas outside the Roman Empire, it is often not possible to decide on the correct reading (for place names see section 1.2.4). Here, spelling mistakes are all the more likely. when, for example, Germanic place names are words of a language that was alien to the copyists in Alexandria and later in Byzantium. The sources used by Ptolemy For identification of the places mentioned by Ptolemaios it is important to ask where he could have got information about them from. Ptolemaios reports that his representation of the oikumene is also based on his own view (GH V 11, 5, l), but his own travel activity may not have been too extensive. It is also very likely that he did not visit Germania, Gaul and the Roman provinces on the Danube himself, so that his description of these areas is not based on his own local knowledge, but exclusively on external sources. The basis of the entire Geography is the work of Marinos of Tyre, a geographer of the 1st / 2nd centuries, of whom we owe our knowledge, apart from a few references by the Arab geographer al- Mas’üdi (died 956), only to Ptolemy.
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