by Michael Kimaid

This article is a comparative study of how the Ohio territory and the nation of Liberia were mapped and settled in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Despite the great distance separating the two, both were perceived of similar minds: early Americans who believed that their interests could be realized through a conscious manipulation of geography and the people who previously inhabited the land they coveted. Ultimately, both Ohio and Liberia are demonstrative of early conceptions of state and nation that would eventually give rise to the territorial empires of the nineteenth century. Prior to the development of geographical systems that accounted for land at the expense of the people who lived there, empires existed as centers and peripheries of power. By replacing the vague borderlands that had allowed indigenous people a degree of self-determination in their exchanges with an imperial presence with defined and precise borderlands, processes of removal and ultimately subjugation were made possible on a scale that increased the power and wealth of those who drew the maps at the expense of those who had previously laid claim to it.

by George Tolias

This special issue of e-Perimetron attempts a first evaluation of Greek map production in print during the Age of Enlightenment (1665-1820), a hitherto unexplored area of both Enlightenment cartography and the history of Greek printing. The issue is divided into two parts : the first is a short, interpretative effort to trace the history of Greek cartographic output in print, to evaluate its resources and functions, and to shed light on matters of its production and diffusion; the second part contains an elementary cartobibliography of 121 maps printed in Greek during the Age of Enlightenment, in a provisory checklist, open to additions and emendations.

by Evangelos Livieratos

In this short note it is put in evidence for the first time some important differences which exist in apparently two versions of Rigas Velestinlis Charta, the known major 12-sheet map of Greek Enlightenment published in Vienna in 1797.

by Maria Pazarli

The late eighteenth century twelve-sheet map, known as “Rigas Charta”, designed and produced by Rigas Velestinlis, a reference personality of the Greek Enlightenment, apart of its general cartographic value, its symbolisms and its placement in the historical context of the preliminaries, it is further characterized by an impressive representation of a huge number of coins placed all over the map surface. These coins with origin in the ancient and medieval periods are fundamental as a major “thematic” cartographic content of this map, the importance of which is discussed in this paper.

by Manolis Manoledakis

Righas’ Charta, a very important product of Modern Greek Enlightenment and cartography,follows the tradition of the western European “post-ptolemaic” maps, but with the innovative element of the deliberate projection – in many ways – of Greek antiquity. It would be very interesting to know if Charta, which contains a lot of ancient Greek sites, could possibly constitute an important aid for the researcher of ancient topography, for example in the identification of ancient cities whose positions remain until nowadays unknown. In this paper a short factual approach to this question is tried, based on the case of central Macedonia. For this particular area Righas followed strictly the map of G. Delisle, based mainly on Herodotus, Ptolemy and Strabo, but on other ancient sources as well. After the examination of the positions of the known sites of Charta and a comparison with the relevant archaeological data, it turns out that unfortunately Righas’ map is not especially reliable for someone who would try to seek the areas of Charta’s unidentified sites on the actual map.

by Evangelos Livieratos

The Charta of Greece (Map of Greece) by Rigas Velestinlis (1757-1798) printed in Vienna in 1796 and 1797 is a remarkable case in the modern history of maps: Although the aspects of this twelve-sheet map, a monument of the Greek national resurgence, concerning its historic, ideological, political, revolutionary, literary and full of symbolic messages were more or less widely analyzed, mainly in Greek language, very little has been done up to now for the investigation of this great map’s purely cartographic content, from the stand point of the science and technology of Cartography. Many issues associated to the cartographic analysis of Charta remain still open as it is e.g. the geographic placement of the map-framing (the geographic window of the map), the proper georeferencing of the map, the proper union of the map-sheets in a unique two by two metres map, the compatibility of the coastline and of the geometric content with other maps taken as standards, the study of scale variation, the analysis of its projective properties, its deformation analysis, the geometric placement and reference of Charta’s thematic elements (toponyms, verbal elements, symbols, images etc.) as well as a number of other issues related to the theory and practice of scientific and technological cartography.

by George Tolias

The aim of this paper is to present an instance of cultural transfer within the field of late Enlightenment antiquarian cartography of Greece, examining a series of maps printed in French and Greek, in Paris and Vienna, between 1788 and 1811 and related to Abbé Barthélemy’s Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece. The case-study allows analysing the alterations of the content of the work and the changes of its symbolic functions, alterations due first to the transferral of medium (from a textual description to a cartographic representation) and next, to the successive transfers of the work in diverse cultural environments. The transfer process makes it possible to investigate some aspects of the interplay of classical studies, antiquarian erudition and politics as a form of interaction between the French and the Greek culture of the period.

by Maria Pazarli, Evangelos Livieratos & Chryssoula Boutoura

In history of cartography and maps the Tabula Peutingeriana it is considered one of the most important cartographic representations of roman itineraria and an important source for the history of late roman antiquity, especially concerning the road networks implying the mobility pattern in the roman era. It represents almost the whole of the Roman Empire, from the Iberian Peninsula to its east end. The map was originally designed in the 4th c. a. C. and is known from its 13th c. copy. In this paper we visit the “peutingerian” Crete as depicted in Tabula Peutingeriana in terms of modern digital image technologies, analyzing the relevance of the road network in association to Cretan toponyms in comparison to modern cartographic counterparts.

by Evangelos Livieratos & Alexandra Koussoulakou

The links of Cartography to Art and culture are as old as the field itself. The art of painting has always been present within maps, which, in turn have always been regarded as a combination of scientific and artistic skills. One of the most prominent examples of the harmonic duality of maps as scientific tools and objects of culture is witnessed in the Netherlands during the 17th century, when the Dutch were world leaders in the field of cartographic production.