Читать книгу A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East онлайн

108 страница из 236

In a field handling data on individual places, regions, the oikoumenē, and the entire globe, the sources differ according to scale: as topographies, chorographies, or geographies (Romer 1998: 4–5). By the Hellenistic period geographers distinguished between the world and the oikoumenē, and Crates of Mallos even suggested that the globe was divided into four equal zones, each with its own inhabited region, only one of which was so far known (the oikoumenē).¹⁴ Within the oikoumenē, further mathematical divisions were employed for measurements, cartography, and identifying regions. Eratosthenes projected the world map as a series of quadrilaterals, what he called sphragides (“seals”). Each sphragis covered a significant region – India was the first, Ariana the second, the Near East the third, and Arabia and western Africa the fourth (Strabo 2.1.22; Harley et al. 1987: 157). The astronomer Hipparchus (fl. 162–126 BCE) criticized certain of Eratosthenes’s calculations, but not the overall scheme. For example, he corrected (Hipparchus fr. 26) the fourth sphragis by triangulating the distances between Babylon, Pelusium, and Thapsacus on the north Euphrates with updated latitudes for each city (Nicolet 1991: 62). Strabo (2.1.36) criticized Hipparchus’s geometrical method, declaring it too rigid, for example when Hipparchus disputes Eratosthenes’s distance from Thapsacus to Babylon after he had explicitly stated that it followed the course of the Euphrates and was not a straight line.