cover image Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World [With CDROM Map-By-Map Directory]

Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World [With CDROM Map-By-Map Directory]

. Princeton University Press, $600 (1500pp) ISBN 978-0-691-04962-5

Beautifully produced with an exquisite combination of scholarly precision and the highest level of cartographic art, this atlas is one of the greatest achievements in 20th-century Greek and Roman scholarshipDand it probably will never be superceded. It contains 99 strikingly clear and precise color maps reflecting Greek or Roman presence in the ancient world and presenting the landscape, insofar as possible, as it was in those times. The maps provide locations for the sites of thousands of known cities as well as indicators of less securely attested areas of habitation from the ninth-century B.C. to the fifth century A.D. The accuracy of these maps has been made possible by developments in satellite-generated aeronautical charts and recent progress in computational power. The atlas's final production began in 1988; its completion involved over 160 scholars and cartographers (editor Talbert is a professor of history and classics at UNC-Chapel Hill). Readers can choose between a CD-ROM and a print version of the accompanying two-volume map-by-map directory that contains essential information about the sites and their topography. A gazetteer includes the names of and critical information about all the sites located in the maps, and the accompanying Adobe Acrobat Reader provides powerful search capabilities. (Oct.)