Ptolemy’s Britain: Greek Places and their Modern Identifications
An interactive presentation of the places, peoples, coastal features and other geographical names associated with Britain and its surrounding islands in Claudius Ptolemy’s Geōgraphikē Hyphēgēsis.
About this map
This map presents the Greek geographical nomenclature associated with Britain in Ptolemy’s Geography alongside proposed modern identifications. The ancient Greek text is established with reference to the modern critical edition of Alfred Stückelberger and Gerd Graßhoff, with Florian Mittenhuber and others (Basel: Schwabe, 2006), and was checked against manuscript witnesses including Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Urb. gr. 82 and Vat. gr. 191. The manuscript material and zoomable folio viewer are presented below the interactive map for readers who wish to inspect the textual and cartographic witnesses directly.
The modern locations are interpretive. Many of the proposed identifications were informed by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews’s work on Romano-British place-names, especially Britannia in the Ravenna Cosmography: A Reassessment and the related placename gazetteer. These identifications should not be read as equivalent in certainty: the purpose of the map is to make the textual geography explorable while keeping the ancient name, the modern identification and the scholarly act of identification conceptually distinct.
The interface can display Ptolemy’s names in their original Greek script or in a simplified Latin transliteration. Filters for peoples, feature types and record classes are linked: selecting one category reduces the remaining selectors to combinations that actually occur in the data. The gazetteer and map are also linked in both directions, and every record has a stable local identifier that can be copied as a permalink.
Interactive map and gazetteer
CAWM is the default basemap; DARE can be selected from the map control.
| Ptolemaic name | Modern identification | Feature type | People | Ptolemy |
|---|
Public Domain Mark 1.0
Ptolemy’s Britain in the manuscript tradition
The interactive map above presents the ancient names at proposed modern locations. The manuscript tradition preserves a very different visual object: Britain and Ireland as understood through Ptolemy’s own geographical framework.
This early-fourteenth-century Greek map in British Library Add. MS 19391 was copied from the Urb. gr. 82 tradition. It offers a useful visual bridge between Ptolemy’s text, the surviving manuscript maps and the modern-identification map presented here.
Explore the manuscript witnesses
Optional IIIF viewer: Urb. gr. 82, ff. 63v–64r, and Vat. gr. 191, ff. 128v–169v
The project was checked against two Vatican manuscripts. Open this section to inspect them directly: Urb. gr. 82 opens at the British map on ff. 63v–64r; Vat. gr. 191 opens at the beginning of its Ptolemaic section. The viewer loads only when requested.
Rights note. The Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana states that rights must be requested for use of its images in printed or online publications. This technical demo loads the library’s own IIIF resources rather than redistributing image files; permission/terms should nevertheless be confirmed before deploying the embedded Vatican viewer publicly. The manuscript can always be consulted through the linked DigiVatLib viewer.
The manuscript tradition: stemma codicum
No surviving Greek manuscript of Ptolemy’s Geography predates the late thirteenth century, leaving roughly a millennium between Ptolemy’s composition of the work in the second century AD and the earliest extant codices. Florian Mittenhuber’s reconstruction of the principal lines of transmission distinguishes two ancient recensions, conventionally labelled Ξ and Ω, both themselves lost. The simplified stemma below follows Mittenhuber’s 2010 presentation and concentrates on the witnesses most important for understanding the present project.
Why U and X matter here
The two Vatican manuscripts consulted for this project are unusually complementary. Urb. gr. 82 (U) belongs to the Ω recension, specifically the Δ group, together with the Seragliensis (K) and the Copenhagen fragment (F). By contrast, Vat. gr. 191 (X) is the only surviving manuscript that directly represents the other principal recension, Ξ.
Mittenhuber stresses the particular textual importance of X because it preserves numerous place-names and coordinates that differ significantly from the Ω witnesses and cannot simply be explained as ordinary copying mistakes. Unfortunately, its coordinate series becomes incomplete later in the work. Using U and X side by side therefore offers access to both major branches of the surviving textual tradition.
The Ω recension contains most surviving manuscripts. Mittenhuber divides it into two principal families: Π, represented here by R and V, and Δ, represented by U, K and F. Manuscript O (Florence, Laur. gr. 28.49) is treated as a Mischhandschrift—a mixed witness showing influence from more than one branch.
- U
- Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. gr. 82
- X
- Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 191
- K
- Istanbul, Topkapı Sarayı, Seragliensis GI 57
- F
- Copenhagen, Fragmentum Fabricianum Hauniensis gr. 23
- R
- Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, Marc. gr. 516 (= 904)
- V
- Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 177
- O
- Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Laur. gr. 28.49
Sources and attribution
- Ptolemy, Geōgraphikē Hyphēgēsis. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. gr. 82 (11th century), especially ff. 63v–64r for the British map.
- Ptolemy, Geōgraphikē Hyphēgēsis. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 191 (13th century), ff. 128v–169v.
- British Library, Add. MS 19391, ff. 19v–20: Greek map of Hibernia and Albion derived from Ptolemy, early 14th century; image via Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain Mark 1.0.
- Klaudios Ptolemaios, Handbuch der Geographie: Griechisch–Deutsch, ed. Alfred Stückelberger and Gerd Graßhoff, with Florian Mittenhuber et al., 2 vols. (Basel: Schwabe, 2006).
- Florian Mittenhuber, “The Tradition of Texts and Maps in Ptolemy’s Geography,” in Alexander Jones (ed.), Ptolemy in Perspective: Use and Criticism of his Work from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century, Archimedes 23 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), pp. 95–119, DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-2788-7_4.
- Keith J. Fitzpatrick-Matthews, Britannia in the Ravenna Cosmography: A Reassessment, together with the author’s related Romano-British placename gazetteer.