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

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The Greco-Roman textual tradition of Near Eastern geography divides into practical geography, the distances and topographia (description of places, topoi) useful to people on the ground, and philosophical geographia (description of the world, gē), discussions and calculations aimed at explaining the entire known world (the oikoumenē). These two types of geography were closely related. Practical geographies supplied empirical data essential to the theoreticians’ hypotheses, while philosophers provided a worldview that directed practical geographers in their measurements and descriptions. The guiding aim of philosophical geographies was both scientific and political: to explain how the dimensions and details of the world conformed to the reasoned and observed laws of nature and human activity. The earliest (sixth to fourth centuries BCE) written geographies of the Near East show this tendency, providing topographical information that helped educated Greek audiences better understand the Persian Empire as a geopolitical rival within a Hellenocentric world geography (Nicolet 1991: 5–6; Harrison 2007: 55). The priorities and methods of geographical writers changed depending on their intellectual and political contexts, for example when Rome became the dominant power. Not only was geography culturally embedded as a literary form, but its frame of reference, from units of measure to place names to concepts of landscape and space, varied according to author and period.