Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity

Abstract

In the introduction and five chapters of this book Johnson presents an interesting journey through various kinds of writing in Greek, Latin, and Syriac on a spectrum between geography and travel accounts, with the intention of showing how texts from late antiquity often display what he calls ‘an aesthetic of accumulation’, ‘cartographical thinking’, and ‘archival practice’, whereby ‘the shape of the physical world became a fundamental literary metaphor for the organization of knowledge itself’ (p. 29). This seems to mean that the authors under consideration shared a desire to produce works of an encyclopedic nature which would provide readers with information about places usually connected with the Old or New Testament or with later holy people living in the Holy Land and Middle East. However, the title and introduction are perhaps slightly misleading, for the book gives the reader both more and less than these lead one to expect. Despite the supposed focus on late antiquity, the book covers much more ground, ranging from Homer and Herodotus to Syriac writers of the ninth century, and concluding with an appendix of original works on not only geographical but also astronomical, cosmographical, and topographical themes from the first to the seventh century ce. In the final paragraphs the author appears to admit a sense that the book is not only wide ranging but somewhat ‘all over the place’ when he refers to it as a ‘series of studies’ rather than a comprehensive history of geography or of travel writing. Although the book serves to provide a sort of archive of writings with similar themes, in particular those of pilgrimage and sacred topography, and may inspire the reader to explore further some less familiar works, in places it appears to lose direction and itself to reflect the description Johnson gives of Theodosius’ Topography of the Holy Land as ‘a jumble of information culled from different sources’ (p. 41) or of Egeria who ‘often stops to zigzag across her previous path’ (p. 91).