Graeciae Antiquae.

Title

Graeciae Antiquae.

Description

Map shows the antique Greece with Mazedonia on an inset map.

ca. 1816

Artist

Anville´d (1697-1782)

Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1697 -1782), was a French geographer and the reformer of old and new cartography. Bourguignon d'Anville devoted himself early to geographical studies, already in the age of 21 became a royal geographer.With this appointment he later rose as a private secretary of Louis, Duke of Orléans. He published 211 maps and became a member of the Académie des sciences in 1773. His valuable map collection, consisting of 10,500 numbers, was purchased for the Royal Library of Paris, now the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, was a geographer and cartographer who greatly improved the standards of map making. Particularly valuable are his maps of ancient geography, which are characterized by careful, accurate work and are largely based on original research. He left unknown areas of continents blank and noted dubious information as such; compared to the elaborate maps of his predecessors, his maps seemed empty. His first serious map, that of ancient Greece, was published when he was fifteen years old. At the age of twenty-two he was appointed one of the king's geographers and began to attract the attention of the first authorities. D'Anville's studies included everything geographical in the world's literature as far as he could find it: To this end, he searched not only ancient and modern historians, travelers, and storytellers of every kind, but also poets, orators, and philosophers. One of his favorite themes was to reform geography by putting an end to blind copying of older maps, by testing the generally accepted positions of places by a rigorous examination of all descriptive authority, and by excluding from cartography any name that was inadequately supported.

Historical Description

Greece is considered the cradle of Western civilisation, being the birthplace of democracy, Western philosophy, Western literature, historiography, political science, major scientific and mathematical principles, Western drama and the Olympic Games. From the eighth century B.C., the Greeks were organised into various independent city-states, known as poleis (singular polis), which spanned the entire Mediterranean region and the Black Sea. Philip of Macedon united most of the Greek mainland in the fourth century BC, with his son Alexander the Great rapidly conquering much of the ancient world, from the eastern Mediterranean to India. Greece was annexed by Rome in the second century B.C., becoming an integral part of the Roman Empire and its successor, the Byzantine Empire, which adopted the Greek language and culture. The Greek Orthodox Church, which emerged in the first century A.D., helped shape modern Greek identity and transmitted Greek traditions to the wider Orthodox World. After falling under Ottoman dominion in the mid-15th century, Greece emerged as a modern nation state in 1830 following a war of independence.