History Online - Chronology

I also developed a method for the chronological order of ancient maps. Any geographical map reflects the state of geoscience of the period when the map was made. With the development of scientific ideas, maps improve more and more, i.e., the amount of incorrect information decreases, and that of reliable data increases. An optimal map-code permitting us to represent any map (given graphically or described verbally) as a table similar to an EC was worked out and based on the analysis of concrete ancient maps. The list of items of this table will be omitted here. An experimental check performed in 1979-I 1980 permitted us to formulate and justify the following "chart-improvement i principle". If a chronologically correctly ordered sequence of maps is given, then, in the I transfer from old charts to new ones, two processes occur, namely, incorrect ' features which do not correspond to real geography vanish and no longer appear on the maps, i.e., "errors are not repeated", and the correct ones which have been introduced, e.g., availability of a channel or river, profile of the bank, are fixed and retained in all subsequent charts.

Due to the role which maps always played in sea-faring, and so forth, this chart-improvement principle has been introduced because of the urgent re-t quirements arising from practice. The principle has been verified according to i the procedure used in the previous items. We establish a certain order of the charts, construct the graph of L(To,T) for each To where L(To, To) equals the number of features first appearing on a map To, whereas L(To,T) indicates how many of them remained on the chart T. We should assume an ordering of the charts to be chronologically correct if all the graphs of L(To, T) are close to that represented in Fig. 24 (and incorrect otherwise). In particular, charts which seem to be visually close turn out to be close in time, too: Each epoch is characterized, as can be seen, by its unique set of maps. The verification of the principle has been made more complicated by the fact that few ancient charts survived up to the present time. Nevertheless, a sufficient number of charts permitting this to verify the model were collected.

Those of the 15th century turned out to be quite primitive and rather far-fetched; their quality then improves steadily until, in the 16th century, we encounter sufficiently correct maps, and even globes dating from the 17th century. Meanwhile, the quality improved extremely slowly. For example, the geographical knowledge of 16th-century Europe was still very far from that of today. One map signed in 1522 by T. Occupario represented Europe and Asia in proportion sharply contrasting to the modern Europe: Greenland is a European peninsula there, Scandinavia elongated into a thin strip, the Bosphorus and Dardanelles greatly extended, the Black Sea distorted vertically, the Caspian Sea drawn in horizontal direction and literally made unrecognizable, and so forth. The only region reflected more or less correctly is the Mediterranean; still, Greece is represented as a triangle without the Peloponnese. The ethnographical data on this and other maps of the time are yet much farther from those fixed by traditional history. For example, Dacia and Gottia (land of the Goths?) are placed in Scandinavia, Albania on the Caspian Sea, and China is completely absent, the Judei are in Northern Siberia, and so forth. A map of Cornelius Niccolai (1598) abounds in similar distortions, but now to a lesser degree. Finally, a globe of the 17th century in the Moscow History Museum already reflects the true geographical position quite well.

The method permits us to date maps, including "ancient" ones, according to the procedure described above. The obtained results may be quite unexpected. We illustrate this with some typical examples. (1) The famous chart from the Geography by Ptolemy, ed. Basileae, 1545, which is regarded today as ancient, does not fall into the 2nd century, but the 15-16th century, i.e., the time when Ptolemy's book was published. This fact makes us recall quite a similar situation with the Almagest (see above).
(2) The no less famous ancient chart Tabula pentingeriana (see e.g., [I]) falls not at the turn of the millennium, i.e., time of Augustus, but into the 11-12th century. The divergence from the traditional dating is more than 1,000 years.
(3) Series of ancient maps (which are, though, later reconstructions from verbal descriptions in ancient texts; see [75]) by Hesiod (dated traditionally to the 8th century B.C.). Hecataeus (6-5th century B.C.), Herodotus (5th century B.C.), Democritus (5-4th century B.C.), Eratosthenes (276-194 B.C.), the "globe"-Socrates (168-165 B.C.) if dated by the above method, then fall into the th century.