Ancient Greek Maps

A reconstruction of the 10th map of Europe from Ptolemy's Geography, showing Ancient Greece in the Roman era (c. 150 AD). Full size map on deviantart.com:  https://www.deviantart.com/ancientgreekmaps/art/Ptolemy-s-Ancient-Greece-1151394170 The map is meant to be an exact visual representation of Ptolemy's text, not an artistic reconstruction like the medieval maps based on his work. I was inspired instead by similar work at  LacusCurtius A few places where I had to make subjective changes not in the text: The region boundaries are drawn according to a nearest neighbor algorithm as their position can't be determined more precisely than that.  The text usually only provides coordinates for the start and end points of rivers, and I had to tweak the river courses a little to avoid paradoxes like a river going through a mountain, which would happen often if I just drew a straight line between the river's two endpoints.  mountains are usually not assigned to regions in the...

Full sized map on deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/ancientgreekmaps/art/The-Persian-satrapies-of-Herodotus-1150623823 This map shows how Herodotus imagined the division of the Persian empire into satrapies, which is fundamentally different from how Persian inscriptions and all the later greek/roman writers describe it. I was originally trying to reconcile Herodotus' evidence with all the other sources to create a single definitive satrapy map, but once you actually plot the Herodotus provinces on a map it quickly becomes undeniable that he was simply wrong in many cases, and that his version is an outlier, while all the other sources paint a relatively coherent picture with only minor differences. Some of Herodotus's provinces, like no. 19, are absurdly small, others like no. 14 and 16 are absurdly large. The southern half of satrapy #16 (Parthia and Aria) is separated from Chorasmia and Sogdiana by the Karakum desert with no road connection between the two halves, and th...