The World as it Was
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albert needs this many maps. He’s editing the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World. Has been, in fact, for twelve years. This fall the atlas will finally be published. People are getting excited. A lot of them—historians, classical scholars, students, philologists, readers of the Bible, military buffs—have been holding their breath for a long time.

Why? Well, we can’t fully understand the world of the Greeks and Romans without good maps—maps that show us their world. To enter that world, we need to see the landscape as it was 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

“But the sad fact is that maps of this type do not exist,” Talbert says. Sure, there’s Smith’s Atlas of Ancient Geography Biblical and Classical. But it was published in 1874.

“Now let’s see,” Talbert says, hurrying off to rummage through a pile in the corner. “Ah, yes.” He cradles a broad, heavy book to the table. Bound in green leather, its pages are edged in gold and starting to crumble. It’s Smith’s 1874 atlas.

Smith’s maps are breathtaking, with land contours more spidery and precise than the etching on a dollar bill. “You have to realize that to make this map took the best part of a year,” Talbert says. “One man engraved the landscape; another did the lettering. Then the maps were colored by hand. Just think of it!”

So you won’t likely find Smith’s atlas at the corner bookstore. What's more, we’ve learned a lot about the classical world since 1874. “That book is a staggering achievement, but our knowledge and technology have far surpassed it,” Talbert says.

o why not create a successor to Smith’s atlas? Plenty of folks have tried—and failed, largely. In the 1920s, a handful of European nations gave it a shot. They’re still puttering along today, bickering over map scales and modern country borders, while releasing their maps one sheet at a time. A given region can only be mapped by the country now controlling it—and each country is unwilling to map beyond its modern boundaries.

So it goes for other atlas projects. Two started in the 1960s, one German and one Austrian. At around $3,000 a set, they’re “fabulously expensive,” Talbert says. Even so, he feels they’re trying to do too much—they map cultural, political, and social movements. Talbert points to one map loaded with color-coded symbols. “Look at this,” he says. “You’ve got railways running all over the place—not exactly features of the Byzantine landscape.”

So in 1988, after establishing that maps available for classical studies were “utterly disastrous,” the American Philological Association asked Talbert to take over the production of a new classical atlas. Millions of dollars would have to be raised. Hundreds of thousands of facts would have to be checked and rechecked. Scholars from all over the globe would have to be recruited—and someone would have to make them cooperate. “Failure on all fronts was almost a certainty,” Talbert says.

He took the job.

“Mind you, I’ve never been out to pick holes in these other projects,” he says. “They’re doing new and important research, but they’re doing it in a traditional way. They’re not really giving us the chance to see the ancient world, from a map perspective, as well as we could.”

That’s what this new atlas is all about.

Next: What do we stand to learn from this atlas?
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