Ptolemy's heritage: The atlas as an ordering device

Abstract

ABSTRACTWith his geography manual Geographia, Claudius Ptolemy not only produced the first atlas as a systematic map coverage of the known world but through his introduction of coordinate pairs for topographical objects, both rendered in these maps and in lists – thus producing the first gazetteer – he also provided the tools for georeferencing, and thus for ordering geospatial data. He was able to produce this gazetteer through his compilation work, matching distances between towns from travel reports with the few known astronomical positions. The article describes how in the sixteenth-century Netherlands this Ptolemaic legacy was gradually mastered, first through editing Greek and Latin editions of Ptolemy's geography manual, reconstructing and publishing his maps, producing concordances between the names in Ptolemy's gazetteer and modern names, and finally by substituting Ptolemy's mapping of the known world in antiquity by an updated version, culminated in Mercator's atlas , which, however, conceptually did not surpass its model.