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PART I Sources

Gillian Ramsey

The geographical sources for the Hellenistic and Roman Near East available today are Strabo’s Geography, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Ptolemy’s Geography, itineraries, Periploi (“circumnavigations”), a collection of minor geographies from medieval manuscripts, sections of historical works, and fragments of geographical texts collected from quotations in Strabo and others. These texts convey a rich body of ancient knowledge and speculation about Near Eastern geography, based on the changing interests of given periods and drawing upon a long history of travel to and curiosity about the Near East. People acquired and shared information about places, climates, travel routes, commodities, and habits of living through practical experience, oral communication, and texts, of which some are lost and others survive for study today. Geographical sources were not in total agreement about what lay east of the Mediterranean, and the task of collating and comparing different accounts faced ancient writers just as it does historians today. It is very clear that Strabo, for one, used many sources for his writing. Pliny the Elder was helpful enough to list his sources in the introduction to his Natural History (1.5b–c), and a glance at his bibliography for book 5 – which covers Near Eastern geography – reveals the scope of material he had on hand for his research: Augustus’s right-hand man Agrippa tops the list of Roman authorities, while foreign sources include Hecataeus, Dicaearchus, Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Polybius, Herodotus, and Eudoxus.