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TheBarrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World is a large-format English language atlas of ancientEurope,Asia, and NorthAfrica, edited byRichard J. A. Talbert. The time period depicted is roughly fromarchaic Greek civilization (pre-550 BC) throughLate Antiquity (640 AD). The atlas was published byPrinceton University Press in 2000. The book was the winner of the 2000Association of American PublishersAward for Best Professional/Scholarly Multivolume Reference Work in the Humanities.
The main (atlas) volume contains 102 color topographic maps, covering territory from theBritish Isles and theAzores and eastward toAfghanistan and westernChina. The size of the volume is 33 x 48 cm. A 45-pagegazetteer is also included in the atlas volume. The atlas is accompanied by a map-by-map directory on CD-ROM, inPDF format, including a search index. The map-by-map directory is also available in print as a two-volume, 1,500 page edition.
According to the editor, the purpose of each map is to offer an up-to-date presentation of the important physical and covered features of the area, using all available literal, epigraphic, and archaeological data.
Most of the maps are of the scale 1:1,000,000 or 1:500,000. However, the environs of the three greater centers (Athens,Rome,Byzantium-Constantinople) are presented in 1:150,000. Some remote regions, where Greeks and Romans mostly explored and traded rather than settled (i.e.Baltic,Arabia,East Africa,India,Sri Lanka), are of the scale 1:5,000,000. Due to the nature of the base maps used for the background and time–cost restrictions, elevation lines (contours) were left in feet except for the 1:150,000 maps where they are in meters. Theprojection of the maps isLambert Conformal Conic. Again due to time and cost restrictions,geo-referencing of the maps was left as a future separate project.
Effort was spent to show the physical landscape in its ancient rather than modern aspect. As expected, this task often met insurmountable difficulties, due to the lack of data. In those cases, at least an effort was made to eliminate known modern features and to restore the affected landscapes.
The atlas' production began in 1988 at theUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and involved a team of 221 classicists and 22 map makers.[1] The effort was funded by $4.5 million—"an unusually large sum for a project in the humanities"[2]—in federal and private donations. The largest individual contributor was Robert B. Strassler's family philanthropyThe Barrington Foundation which supported the project with over $1 million and for which, in accordance with the donor's wishes, the atlas is named. (The foundation, in turn, is named after the Strassler family's place of residence,Great Barrington, Massachusetts.)[3]: 4 [4]: 23
The atlas provides an up-to-date reference for ancient geography, supersedingWilliam Smith'sAn Atlas of Ancient Geography, Biblical and Classical (London: John Murray, 1872–1874), the last successfully completed attempt to comprehensively map theGreco-Roman world and reflect the state of scholarship.[5]
An ongoing wiki-like on-line large scale collaboration for maintaining and diversifying theBarrington Atlas data-set is carried on by the Pleiades Project.[6]
The time period covered is roughly from 1000 BC up to c. AD 640, categorized as following:
All eras are covered in every map (i.e. there are not separate maps for different periods of the same region).
The Latin titles given to the regional categories and to the individual maps (see below) are no more than generalized identifications. E.g. Internum Mare (literally, "Internal Sea") is the region around Mediterranean Sea.
Inside maps, ancient names are underlined with specific colors, when they are applicable only to a specific era. Where modern names are used, they are printed in different (sans-serif) font. For the physical features, standard Latin descriptive terms are usually used (e.g. Lacus for Lake, Mons for Mountain). Explanations for these terms are given in the Map Key. When there is doubt whether the name correctly applies to a feature or area, it is followed by a question mark. When only the approximate location is known, the name is italicized.
The two volumes[7] (and the CD-ROM) contain:
The CD-ROM also contains the gazetteer in PDF format and an installer of the version 4 ofAdobeAcrobat Reader with Search forMicrosoft Windows andMac OS X. However, on Windows systems with the latest version of the Adobe Acrobat Reader already installed, installation of the version 4 might lead to incompatibility problems.
The supplied PDF index file BATLINDX.PDX is readable for Acrobat Reader versions up to and including version 9.For version X and later, using the "Use Advanced Search Options" item in the "Edit" menu may be a workaround.However, searching the complete index directory will take a while and with each new search the scanning of PDF files starts again from scratch. In general it will be faster to look for a name in the index. So, though the atlas claims to be "a reference work of permanent value",[8] a simple Acrobat Reader update will cripple its usability even for users who have the printed version of the map-by-map directory available, because the index shows only the main entries for each object.
The map-by-map directory and the gazetteer are also available in PDF format at the Princeton University Press website.[9] Until 2013, a free download of the CD-ROM as aZIP file was offered as well.[10]
In November 2013, PUP released an iPad 2+ App version of the Atlas which retailed at a 95% discount from the hardcover edition making it more accessible to the average reader.[11][12] It contains the complete contents of the atlas and is searchable.[13]