A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ Augustus and emperors after him to send expeditions. After the Hellenistic settlement of Greeks throughout the Near East, civilian-led enterprise also produced written geographies focusing on regional commodities and trade in addition to the logistic and political information of state commissioned sources (cf. Casson 1989: 8).

Most writers of practical geographies produced not maps, but written versions of oral travel instructions and topographical descriptions. Cartography was the province of the philosophical geographers, particularly those whose specialisms were astronomy and terrestrial phenomena. Such geographical studies had a long history, beginning with Anaximander of Miletos (first half of the sixth century BCE), credited by Diogenes Laertius (2.2) with inventing the sundial and being the first to draw the circumference (perimetron) of the earth and sea (Dilke 1985: 23).¹ Successive theoreticians combined personal observations, second-hand reports, celestial and mathematical models, and logical deduction to expand and improve the description of the world, but only a few used actual cartography (Irby 2012). Like the practical geographers, written descriptions dominated their field. Knowledge of the oikoumenē grew after Alexander’s conquests pushed back its horizons. In the third century BCE Eratosthenes – who invented the word geographia (Roller 2010: 1, 12ff) – created a world map representing these new lands, and his summation of the theories about cartographic projection constituted a scientific breakthrough (Dilke 1985: 32–35). Geographers, however, continued to debate with many criticisms, corrections, and controversies over the shape, proportions, and substance of the oikoumenē, and this discourse forms the bulk of Classical geographical writing. Such scholarship continued through late antiquity and led to the creation of several invaluable codices preserving the so-called “Minor Greek Geographers” – one such collection was assembled by Marcianus of Heraclea (sixth century CE) and preserved in the Codex Parisinus supplement grec 443 (Schoff 1927: 9; Diller 1952: 3ff; Shipley 2011: 1).

      Practical Geographies

       Greek Sources

The Hellenistic soldiers and colonists who ventured into the Near East under Alexander and his Successors entered a not entirely unfamiliar region. Many Greeks had journeyed into Persian territory often in the service of the satraps and kings, such as the Greek mercenaries employed by Cyrus the Younger between 401 and 399 BCE and Ctesias of Cnidus who served as physician in the court of Artaxerxes II Mnemon until 398/7 BCE and wrote histories of Assyria and Persia.² People returning from Near Eastern travels likely transmitted a good deal of geographical information by word of mouth, and this shaped people’s awareness of Persian territory. Hecataeus of Miletus (fl. 500 BCE) traveled in Asia and Egypt and wrote Periodos Gēs (Circuit of the Earth), alternatively titled Periēgēsis (Guidebook of the Earth), in which he combined information from his travels with the ideas promulgated by the Milesian philosophers.³ This was the first geographical prose text, soon followed by Herodotus’s Histories, which contains several criticisms of earlier methods and results (cf. Hdt. 4.36–42). We know of other early writers of Persian histories (typically entitled Persika), whose works are now fragmentary: Dionysius of Miletus (FGrH 687), Hellanicus of Lesbos (FGrH 687a), and Charon of Lampsacus (FGrH 687b) all wrote in the fifth century, while Heracleides of Cyme (FGrH 689), Deinon of Colophon (FGrH 690), and Ephorus of Cyme (FGrH 70) wrote in the fourth century. Thus at the outset of the Hellenistic period, Greeks, Macedonians, and others from the West arrived with a set of preconceptions about life in the East, including notions of Eastern geography and the disposition and significance of different territories within it.

      With Alexander was a group of men conventionally known as the bematists, or “pacers,” who accompanied his army engineers and surveyed the land routes traversed by his campaign (cf. Fraser 1996: 78ff). Pliny the Elder (HN 6.61–62) names Diognetos and Baiton as Alexander’s itinerum mensores and lists their land measurements for a long distance route from Media to India passing through the Caspian Gates, Hecatompylos, Alexandria in Areia, Prophthasia of the Drangoi, a city of the Arachosians, Hortospanus, Alexandria near the Hindu Kush, the Copheta river and Peucolaïtis, the Indus and Taxila, and finally the Hydaspes. He notes also that variant calculations existed for the stretch up to the Hindu Kush, presumably because more people were able to explore here than beyond it in the Indus region. Athenaeus (10.59) calls Baiton a bematist, also supplying the title of his text: Stathmoi tēs Alexandrou poreias (Stations of Alexander’s Expedition). Athenaeus (2.74, 10.59, 11.102, 12.9, and 12.39) mentions another bematist, Amyntas, whose work was titled Stathmoi or Stathmoi Persikoi. We know of another of Alexander’s pacers, Philonides, whose dedicatory inscription for his statue at Olympia lists him as “day-runner (hemerodromos) of king Alexander and bematist of Asia” (Inschriften von Olympia 276 and 277; Paus. 6.16.5). Philonides probably earned his statue for running across the Peloponnese from Sicyon to Elis, reported by Pliny (HN 2.181 and 7.84) as a distance of 1,305 stades, or approximately 149 miles (Matthew 1974: 165–166). That Philonides combined service as a courier and pacer recalls the extensive highway network used by the Persians for communicating across their empire. Aristotle (de mundo 398a) names hēmerodromoi among the servants of the king, and Herodotus (8.89) describes the impressive speed of the Persian couriers who relayed messages from station to station on horseback, a task requiring thorough knowledge of the terrain. Pliny (HN 6.63) hints that bematists continued in royal service after Alexander, reporting that Seleucus I, or rather anonymous people in his employ, completed the distances for India as far as the mouth of the Ganges. We also know of the general Patrokles, who explored the Caspian region for Seleucus I, and to whom geographies of Hycania and India are attributed (Pliny HN 6.58; FGrH 712; Müller FHG II, 442–444).

       Units of Measurement

The titles of the bematists’ geographies were all apparently Stathmoi (Stations), indicating that they organized their data according to the stopping points along an itinerary. This had its basis in the practical needs of travelers, who needed to know how to schedule their journeys and arrange where to stay overnight. This was made possible by the many stathmoi, quite literally “stops,” way-stations, and caravanserais which dotted the old routes of the Persian Empire, spaced approximately a day’s travel apart and serving as watering holes, camp-sites, and courier depots. The bematists took measurements using the stadion (or stade) and stathmos, though the parasang and schoinos were also employed when dealing with pre-existing Persian distances. The stade was a well-known unit, used throughout Greece, and the stathmos came into use in the Hellenistic period when long overland journeys became more common. Neither unit was a fixed or exact measurement but varied according to region of use and topography of the route being measured. A stade is typically estimated as around 184 meters, for purposes of rough conversions into modern measurement units (except for Egyptian stades, which were shorter, like the Egyptian schoinos). A stathmos not only denoted the stopping point on a route, but also the distance traveled between two stops, hence it measured one day’s travel, variable depending on how heavily laden the travelers and their pack animals were. Herodotus (5.53) reports 111 stations on the Persian royal road from Sardis to Susa, which measured 13,500 stades, and, reckoning that a day’s journey was 150 stades, he reports that the total travel time along the road was 90 days.

      Herodotus (2.6, 5.53) describes the Persian parasang measure as 30 stades and the Egyptian schoinos as 60; by his account the Sardis to Susa route was 450 parasangs. Xenophon (Anab. 2.2.6, 5.5.4, 7.8.26) also gives 30 stades for the parasang, although the passages in the Anabasis with his journey calculations hint at the parasang as either a variable unit of measure or one employed more for narratological impact than mathematical accuracy (Rood 2010). Strabo (11.11.5) puts the parasang at 40 stades, noting that it varied between 30 and 60 stades according to different authorities, and he gives the same length and variations for the schoinos. Strabo credits Artemidorus (not Herodotus) with the schoinos equivalency of 30 stades, based on his distance from Alexandria to the vertex of the СКАЧАТЬ