Claudius Ptolemy was a astronomer-astrologer-geographer-mathematician living and working in Alexandria, Egypt in the 2nd century C.E. The Almagest, on astronomy, was his first great work. Some years later, around the year 150, he published the Geography, a catalogue or database of 8,000 latitudes and longitudes of places all over the known world. The work includes detailed mathemetical methods on how to draw maps using four different projections. Until the end of the 15th century it was the definitive atlas of the world.

For a work of such importance to the history of civilization, you’d be right to assume that the Geography would be available in numerous modern editions, the maths and database widely and freely disseminated for demonstration and reintepretation, like other well-known classics.

Yes there are free digitized versions. Nice high-red scans. Pretty maps.

There is a complete, academically respected edition of the Geography in German.

There is an academically respected edition of the Geography in English, but it does not contain complete location data tables.

Scandal #1: A complete, academically respected edition of the Geography in English does not exist.

Scandal #2: A libre-licensed database of the coordinates of the Geography does not exist.

It seems to me that that all important editions of the Geography, treated as a database, should be digitized as open access databases, published as .csv, .sqlite, or Google Sheets.

This repo aims to encourage others study the Geography by publishing databases from various editions of the Geography. We will start with the 1540 edition published by Henry Petri in Basel and with maps by Sebastian Münster.

I presented Claudius Ptolemy and the first geospatial database (25 mins) for Geomob London in October 2020, introducing Ptolemy’s Geography and concluding with the need for an openly licenesed database. That was followed with an interview on the Geomob podcast.