Strabo's Geography Research Articles

THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF SAMARKAND IS IN SOME WRITTEN SOURCES

The ancient history of Samarkand is preserved in the written sources of many ancient historians, in the articles and books of many historians, and in archaeological sources. The oldest of such sources is the work called "Strabo's Geography" written in the 1st century BC, the events and events written in it, the mention of the name of the city of Samarkand dates back to the last quarter of the 4th century BC, to the period of Alexander the Great's march to Central Asia (329-327)

AN ANALYSIS OF THE ‘CLOSED HARBOURS’ IN STRABO'S GEOGRAPHY: BACKGROUND, NATURE AND MEANING OF THE EXPRESSION

The expression λιμὴν κλειστός appears 29 times in ancient Greek literary sources; however, it has prompted four different interpretations and three possible English translations. As a contribution to the ongoing discussion of the expression's meaning, this paper analyses its appearances in Strabo's Geography; this work, with its nine references, is, in fact, the source in which it appears second most often. In particular, focus will be placed upon two issues: the extent to which the expression is employed consistently in the Geography and its possible origin; and what meaning(s) – if any – can be assigned to it. To gain further insight into the expression's meaning(s), the aforementioned cases of ‘closed harbours’ will be compared with the available archaeological and geomorphological evidence.

Textual Wanderings: Homeric Scholarship and the Written Landscape of Strabo's Geography

This article examines Strabo's attitude towards Homeric scholarship, textual emendation and the wanderings of mythical heroes. By exploring the interconnections between these themes, three broader aspects of the Geography are elucidated: the relationship between Homeric and historical truth and fiction, Strabo's self-fashioning as a late Hellenistic scholar, and the significance of interpretations of past heroic wanderings as a means of exploring present geopolitical concerns. The discussion focuses upon two particular case studies: the travels of Jason and the Argonauts and the wanderings of Aeneas. Ultimately, through this examination Strabo emerges as a liminal figure who firmly straddles the divide between the worlds of past Hellenistic textual scholarship and Imperial Greek literature.

The Geography of Strabo

In his seventeen-book Geography, Strabo (c. 64 BCE c. 25 CE) discusses geographical method, stresses the value of geography, and draws attention to the physical, political, and historical details of separate countries. Geography is a vital source for ancient geography and informative about ancient geographers.

Reinterpreting Strabo's Geography for the Taman Peninsula (SW Russia) – a geoarchaeological study solves an old problem

Reinterpreting Strabo's Geography for the Taman Peninsula (SW Russia) – a geoarchaeological study solves an old problem

Civic and other public planting in ancient Greece

The Western tradition of civic planting originates in ancient Greece, and especially in ancient Athens. Civic planting — the planting of the public spaces of a city for the benefit of all the citiz...

The tide predictions for D-Day

Based on the physics of Newton and Laplace, the big brass tide-predicting machine designed by Lord Kelvin was crucial for the success of the Normandy invasion in World War II.

GEOGRAPHY AS THE EYE OF ENLIGHTENMENT HISTORIOGRAPHY

Whilst Edward Gibbon's Memoirs of My Life comprise a notoriously complex document of autobiographical artifice, there is no reason to question the honesty of its revelation of his attitudes to geography and its relationship to the historian's craft. Writing of his boyhood before going up to Oxford, Gibbon commented that his vague and multifarious reading could not teach me to think, to write, or to act; and the only principle, that darted a ray of light into the indigested chaos, was an early and rational application of the order of time and place. The maps of Cellarius and Wells imprinted in my mind the picture of ancient geography: from Stranchius I imbibed the elements of chronology: the Tables of Helvicus and Anderson, the Annals of Usher [sic] and Prideaux, distinguished the connection of events . . . This seems a fairly direct comment on Gibbon's attitude to geography as a historian in that it is confirmed by various of his working documents and commonplace book comments not aimed at posterity and by the practice embodied in his great work that was thus targeted, the Decline and Fall. Taking Gibbon's private documents, the first manuscript we have in his English Essays, for example, is a tabulated chronology from circa 1751 when Gibbon was fourteen years old, which begins with the creation of the world in 6000 BC and runs up to 1590 BC, this being exactly the sort of material which could be commonplaced from the likes of Ussher and Prideaux. Matching this attention to chronology is a concern with geography, and indeed the two are coupled together as in his comment in the Memoirs. Thus in his Index Expurgatoris (1768–9), Gibbon berates Sallust as “no very correct historian” on the grounds that his chronology is not credible and that “notwithstanding his laboured description of Africa, nothing can be more confused than his Geography without either division of provinces or fixing of towns”. In this regard, Gibbon the author of the Decline and Fall was a “correct” historian, in that he was careful to frame each arena in which historical events were narrated in the light of a prefatory description of the geography of the location under discussion. This is most readily apparent in the second half of the opening chapter of the work, where Gibbon proceeds on what his “Table of Contents” calls a “View of the Provinces of the Roman Empire”, starting in the West with Spain and then proceeding clockwise to reach Africa on the other side of the Pillars of Hercules, a pattern of geographical description directly mirroring ancient practice in Strabo's Geography and Pomponius Mela's De Situ Orbis. But this practice of prefacing a historical account with geographical description repeats itself at various points in the work, as when, approaching the end of his grand narrative, Gibbon reaches the impact of “Mahomet, with sword in one hand and the Koran in the other” on “the causes of the decline and fall of the Eastern empire”. Before discussing the birth of Islam, Gibbon treats his readers to a discussion of the geography of Arabia, beginning with its size and shape before moving on to its soils, climate and physical–geographic subdivisions.

The sacred groves of ancient Greece

The sacred groves of ancient Greece

"The Chambers of the Dead and the Gates of Darkness": A Glimmer of Political Criticism in Strabo's Geography (Strabo 14.5.4, 670 C, ll. 22-3, ed. Radt)

AbstractThe prosecution of Caepio and Murena was a politically unpopular event from the early years of Augustus' reign. Strabo refers to the matter using a 'quoted quote' from Euripides. I look at possible conclusions to be drawn from Strabo's indirect way of handling his subject matter. I review the evidence for the date of the prosecution of Caepio and Murena. A bitter scholarly debate has led to the rejection of an early 23 BCE date. This legitimate rejection has resulted in a reaction against any date in 23 BCE. I suggest a date late in 23 BCE. A late 23 BCE date has implications for the trial of Primus, which immediately preceded Murena's own trial. I trace a possible connection between Murena's defence of Primus and his own subsequent prosecution for conspiracy. Whatever lay behind Murena's prosecution and death, his treatment shocked contemporaries so much that even the normally pro-Augustan Strabo feels compelled to register his criticism, albeit in an indirect way.

Strabons Geographika (review)

Reviewed by: Strabons Geographika, 1. Prolegomena, Buch I-IV: Text und Übersetzung, and: Strabons Geographika, 2. Buch V-VIII: Text und Übersetzung James Romm Stefan Radt (ed.). Strabons Geographika, 1. Prolegomena, Buch I-IV: Text und Übersetzung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2002. Pp. xxvi, 563. €141.00. ISBN 3-525-259506. Stefan Radt (ed.). Strabons Geographika, 2. Buch V-VIII: Text und Übersetzung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2003. Pp. 560. €156.00. ISBN 3-525-25951-4. Strabo's Geography is one of few remaining major classical works not yet published in a complete critical edition. The great length of his text and the complexity of its manuscript tradition have tended to wear out the lives of his editors: Wolfgang Aly, generally considered the most reliable of these, died before completing the first third of the project (after himself inheriting the posthumous materials of Benedict Niese), and Francesco Sbordone progressed only slightly further in the Rome edition before his death. The Budé version, begun in the 1960s by Germaine Aujac and François Lassère and now apparently halted after reaching book 12, has been deemed sorely deficient (see, e.g., the review by Dicks of the first volume, CR n.s. 21 [1971] 88–94). No Oxford Classical Text has ever existed nor is one planned, to my knowledge, while the Loeb edition begun by J. R. S. Sterrett and completed by Horace Leonard Jones lacks a critical apparatus. What is more, no complete commentary on the Geography has been produced since that of Casaubon in the seventeenth century. A group of scholars who first assembled at Groningen in 1982, led by Stefan Radt, set out to fill these gaps, and the first two of their projected ten-volume text, translation, and commentary have now appeared. To judge by these initial volumes, which contain the text of Geography books 1–8 with facing German translation, and by the sample section of commentary Radt published in a 1991 article in Mnemosyne, the project will undoubtedly succeed in giving us a definitive, reliable, comprehensive edition of Strabo. Radt and his team are proceeding with consummate care, both in their editorial choices and in the overall design and presentation of the series and its individual volumes. Many innovations have been made here to assist scholars grappling with the immensity of Strabo's work and the great variety of material it contains. Headings at the top of each page situate us both in the text (referenced both by book/chapter numbers and by "C" page numbers derived from Casaubon's 1620 edition) and in geographic space. Line numbers at the edge of the page are arranged in such a way that each new Casaubon page starts at line 1, making it possible, for the first time, for scholars to cite Strabo passages by a precise and uniform system (e.g., "Strabo 266C4" designates a single line of text). Cross-references to fragment collections of, say, Eratosthenes—of which there are a great number in book 1 in particular—are given in parentheses within both the Greek text and the facing translation, rather than in footnotes as in the Budé edition. The critical apparatus is extremely clear and complete, and judicious choices have been made from among the variant readings. In general Radt follows the theory of manuscript transmission put forward by Diller, but he also chooses, unlike his predecessors, to avoid grouping manuscripts together and assigning them common sigla on the basis of shared errors or omissions. All sigla used by Radt, that is, refer to individual, extant manuscripts—a sensible precaution against the dangers of creating phantom exemplars which then go on to influence editorial judgments. Another [End Page 204] sensible choice has relegated minor, inconsequential textual variants to an appendix at the back of each volume, where they do not distract the reader from the more important cruces. The exacting methodology employed by Radt and his team can be judged by their decision to publish the Epitome and Chrestomathy, short redactions of portions of Strabo's text, in the ninth volume of the series (tentatively scheduled to appear in 2010), and by the elegant arrangement that they have made...

Did Ptolemais Theron Have a Wall?

New settlement was an important feature of Ptolemaic rule in Egypt. Archaeology can frequently no longer help in understanding the initial processes and structure of new settlement. A few ancient textual references have survived which shed light on such processes. Two culturally very distinct texts -the early Ptolemaic Pithom stela and a section in Strabo's Geography of the early Roman period -describe the foundation of Arsinoe (near modem Suez) and of Ptolemais Theron somewhere along the Ethiopian Red Sea coast. This article discusses the Greek and Egyptian literary treatment of new Ptolemaic settlement. The two texts are set back into their respective cultural contexts and compared with each other as to which factors, genre and topoi shaped the perception of new settlement.

Strabo's Cultural Geography: The Making of a "Kolossourgia"

Strabo's Cultural Geography: The Making of a "Kolossourgia"

Squinting Back at Strabo

Strabo of Amasia (ca. 64 B.c.‐ca. A.D. 23) wrote the first comprehensive geography of the world known to the Greeks and Romans. Interest in Strabo and his Geography, which survives nearly intact in seventeen books, has fluctuated over the centuries among both classicists and historians of geography. After some historical background on Strabo and his reception, this essay considers the contribution of two significant recent English‐language treatments, as well as Strabo's Geography itself, and suggests ways in which the Strabonic model may have renewed relevance to the geographer's task of interpreting the oikoumene in the contemporary world.

THE ROMANS AND US: STRABO'S GEOGRAPHY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ETHNICITY

AbstractThe aim of this article is to study how ethnographic descriptions and categories in Strabo's Geography might be used in the construction of representations of ethnicity. Departing from, in particular, R. Cohen's approach of ethnicity as constructed through nesting dichotomizations, Strabo's text is studied on the basis of the dichotomies of civilised - uncivilised, Greek - barbarian, and Roman - non-Roman. Special attention is given to Strabo's view of the various stages of evolution of human culture, which intersects with the idea of simple dichotomies, as well as to the particular aspect of city-identities. In the end, the problem turns out to be rather complicated, involving the question of the definition of Romanness in social practice, and the emergence of particular provincial identities within the context of the Roman Empire.

The Noarus River in Strabo's Geography

Strabo is the only ancient author who twice mentioned an elsewhere unknown Noarus River near Segestica (elose to Siscia, present-day Sisak in Croatia). In the 5th chapter of his 7th book he described the European regions situated south of the Danube.

A Preliminary Report on the 1999 Field Season at Marsa Nakari

ried out during June and July of 1999. Marsa Nakari is the site of an ancient port city that may be Nechesia recorded in The Geography of Claudius Ptolemy.1 The location of the site is on the coast of the Red Sea (fig. 1). Other Red Sea ports where excavations have been carried out are Quseir al-Qadim2 and Berenike.3 During the Ptolemaic and Roman periods there was much trade with East Africa, Arabia, India and other areas of the East. This trade is chronicled by ancient sources such as The Geography of Strabo,4 The Natural History of Pliny the Elder,5 and

In Search of the Author of Strabo's Geography

‘As intellectuals and academics we are constantly engaging in projects of representation, but in the dominant epistemologies that guide our work, our role as representers is effaced’.‘At the heart of the issue lies a fundamental insistence on the contextualised nature of all forms of knowledge, meaning and behaviour. There is a further recognition of the partial and partisan edge to inquiry, theory construction, and scholarly (re)presentation, as well as an explicit acknowledgement of the importance of the author's biography in this creative process’.The assertions of two modern geographers, Katz and Merrifield, are symptomatic of an underlying, but persistent, debate within their field of study. To what degree should academic prose aim at impersonality? The discipline of modern geography, perhaps more than any other academic subject at pains constantly to justify and redefine itself, has taken on this problem, formulated its history, and posited some solutions.

The Expression "Our Times" in Strabo's Geography

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Expression "Our Times" in Strabo's GeographySarah PothecarySarah Pothecary Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 92, Number 3Jul., 1997 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/449351 Views: 6Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1997 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Anaïs Lamesa Les différents sens du terme Καππαδοκία dans la Géographie de Strabon, Dialogues d'histoire ancienne S 22, no.Supplément22Supplément22 (Apr 2021): 209–225.https://doi.org/10.3917/dha.hs22.0209James Roy Les cités d’Élide, (Jan 1999): 151–176.https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pur.20623

Syme’s Anatolica and the Date of Strabo's Geography

Syme’s Anatolica and the Date of Strabo's Geography