Here’s a great “hidden history” news story from Der Spiegel (in English), that manages to link Ptolemy, Roman trading, Istanbul, Nazi history, and archaeology – well worth reading!
A long-standing mystery about the early history of Germany is that nobody has really had much of an idea where its towns were. Yet the Romans left plenty of references to trading with miscellaneous German peoples, to crossing Germany to get to the Baltic, to arranging politically expedient assassinations, etc: and every once in a while a huge cache of buried treasure turns up. So there plainly were people there… but where were their towns?
Helpfully, the famous 2nd Century CE Alexandrian Greek geographer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy included a nice-looking map of ‘Germania Magna’ in his Geographia, which almost certainly drew on many earlier documents and accounts (Ptolemy never went there himself). Frustratingly, however, the countless attempts by scholars to make the towns indicated there match up to modern towns have failed to please, perhaps because the earliest copy of it they had access to was medieval, dating only to around 1300. Hence the map became infamous as something of an “enchanted castle”, a Voynich Manuscript-like intellectual quicksand apparently designed for PhDs to drown themselves in.
However, a Berlin-based team of academic surveyors and mappers now claim – after a six-year struggle – to have finally worked out how to remap Ptolemy’s 94 German town coordinates onto actual coordinates. What made this possible was the dramatic discovery in the Topkapı Palace library in Istanbul of an earlier copy of Ptolemy’s Geographia (a reproduction of which is due for publication in 2011): the team’s results appear in a new book “Germania und die Insel Thule” (“Germania and the Island of Thule”).
Incidentally, I noted a while back that Professor Gülru Necipoglu had mentioned at a conference in 2006 that a new inventory of the Topkapı Palace library had been uncovered, so perhaps this copy of the Geographia turned up as part of some wider efforts at carrying out more systematic documentation there. Let’s hope so, as many historians believe that this library is likely to contain many more as-yet-unknown historical treasures.
Generally, I have to say that I’m somewhat surprised by this story: firstly, because I’d have thought that the #1 thing any sensible 21st century historical geographer would do would be to map the datapoints into Google Earth for everyone to see; and secondly, because it fails to mention that this ought to yield a bonanza for metal detector hardware shops in Germany, as countless armchair treasure hunters dust off ancient Teutonic myths for clues to legendary gold and silver caches to unearth. Happy hunting!
PS: a great big hat-tip to Matthew Kagle for passing the story on, much appreciated! 🙂
see too Wilkes’ article (2005).
Much of the top end of Italy was denuded by the Venetians, and in the process no doubt they came across a few of the old stations.
I think it ain’t that easy, Nick. IIUC, the (vaguely defined) mission was to take Ptolemy’s error-laden data (I don’t imagine he would haben been able to determine longitudes to minute-accurary…) and map them to the real world, assuming a more or less systematic deviation from the real world.
Ie, Ptolemy’s locations must be mapped by some “geodesic” transformation function. The assumption apparently was that Roman-time settlements would map to present-day settlements — with the exception of some settlements later founded, or vice versa abandoned in the meantime. And here is where the guesswork comes into play…
But if I’m right, there would be no metal detector stampede, because most of the “new sites” would be in the place of current settlements anyway…
E.
Elmar: well, I guess we’ll see how it develops from here – but I wouldn’t underestimate the quality of Ptolemy’s data as a first step. Them Romans, they were pretty systematic… 🙂
Unsolved historical code…
Hi,
I’m Petros Petrosyan.
I now live in Chicago.
Attention Please!
Please Go to: http://www.world-mysteries.com/pex_PPetrosyan1.htm
1. The pyramid is not a sepulcher of Pharaoh and the purpose of
its construction was not on this plane.
2. The basic model of the Pyramid cipher was established.
The basic model of the code of a pyramid is formed of 365 small pyramids
which consist at 14 steps of model of the code.
Thanks,
Petros M.Petrosyan
Hi! This is most interesting. I’ve seen maps constructed from our old version of Ptolemy’s data. He even shows locations in China.
I’ve also seen the data itself. He quotes distances in stadia north of the equator (he’s way off on where it is) and I believe east of the Canary Islands, though it might have been E or W of Alexandria – I forget which. I don’t know what projection he used to calculate this.
He thought the earth’s diameter was about 5300 miles and the Eurasian landmass was about 170 degrees in span – both are off, that’s why Columbus thought he could make it to China.
In any case, that’s the sort of data you’d have to work with. Elmar is right, it won’t be that accurate. It’s somewhat surprising that medieval modifications didn’t improve it, but that’s most likely similar to what they did with ancient herbals.
Not sure if Elmar is right about current sites over old settlements. You have cases of what happened to Roman settlements to compare.
I wonder whether they’ll find more evidence of the Armenian genocide in the Topkapı Palace library, and if so whether the Turks will let it out.
Andreas Kleineberg, Christian Marx, Eberhard Knobloch, Dieter Lelgemann (eds.), Germania und die Insel Thule. Die Entschlüsselung von Ptolemaios´ “Atlas der Oikumene“. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 2010
Ptolemy’s maps and indeed his geographia have been around for centuries. The book contains specific coordinates as well as the projections he used. The only new thing here is the claim that somehow something found in Turkey helps “decipher” Ptolemy’s map… This seems like a puffpiece by the publisher to sell more of the book
Interesting!