Noch ein neuer Artikel zum Thema "Ptolemäus Geographie" von Lyudmila Filatoval, Dmitri Gusevz, Sergey Stafeyev
Iterative Reconstruction of Ptolemy's West Africa Using Modern GIS Analysis
(PDF)
Keywords: Claudius Ptolemy, ancient geography, GIS analysis, historical cartography, georeferencing
Summary
The multifaceted and challenging problem of reconstructing Claudius Ptolemy's map of ancient West Africa from the numeric coordinate data and other information found in his seminal 'Geography' and visualizing the results in modern projections using popular and powerful GIS tools, such as ArcGIS and Google Earth, is addressed by the authors iteratively. We apply a combination of several old and new techniques ranging from traditional toponymic analysis to novel modifications of cluster analysis. Our hybrid human-machine method demonstrates that Ptolemy-s information on West Africa is a compilation of data from three or more sources, including at least one version or derivative of The Periplus of Hanno.
The newest iteration adds data for three more provinces of Ptolemy's Libya - Mauretania Caesariensis, Africa and Aethiopia Interior - to Mauretania Tingitana and Libya Interior investigated in an earlier, unpublished version of the work that the late Lyudmila Filatova had contributed to as the founder of our multi-year project The surviving co-authors used their newest digital analysis methods (triangulation and flocking with Bayesian correction) and took into account their recent finds on Ptolemy's Sinae (Guinea/Senegal, where Ptolemy had placed fish-eating Aethiopians). We discuss some of the weaknesses
and fallacies of the earlier approaches to the problem Our revised digital reconstruction will help modern history of cartography researchers and the general public improve their understanding of what West Africa was like in the distant past.