A DIGITAL REFERENCED STUDY OF PIERRE LAPIE'S MAPS OF GREECE (1822, 1826) WITH RESPECT TO HIS CARTOGRAPHIC RECONSTRUCTION OF PTOLEMY'S GEOGRAPHIA (1834)

摘要

The contribution of the cartographer Pierre Lapie is very worth mentioning during the important French cartographic and mapping activities in the actual and broader areas of the territories covered by today's Greece. His major maps (1822, 1826) representing Greece, constructed the period between the "semi-topographic" maps of Jean Denis Barbie du Bocage and the scientific maps composed by Expedition Scientifique de Moree, described the country's geography and the pictorial spatial documentation of a territory. A country suffering at that time a hard struggle for independence and "known" until then, mainly through the travellers' memoirs and the literary or artistic descriptions (for an analysis of this issue see Livieratos 2009; also Ploutoglou et al. 2011). Lapie's cartographic work is not of course limited in these two maps. Among the maps he constructed for many places in the world, there is a less known representation of the Roman World depicted on contemporary cartographic basis (1834), tracing the routes appearing on the Peutinger map and listed in the Antonine Itinerary (1st century AD). Having in mind that the Roman World is described for first time numerically through geographic coordinates in Ptolemy's Geographia the same period (2nd century AD), this Lapie's cartographic work, brought up recently by Talbert (2007), is an extraordinary task because it gives the first modern view on the spatial correspondence of Ptolemy's inhabited world with today's cartography.