The Roman Land Surveyors

The Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum , compiled in the 5th century AD, was a collection of Roman surveying manuals, produced by a variety of authors, writing at different times and with very different priorities; authors include Julius Frontius, Aegennius Urbicus, Hyginus, Balbus, Siculus Flaccus, as well as miscellaneous texts. This substantial volume aims to make these sources more accessible by presenting the Latin text with facing English translation, suceeded by a 130 page commentary. The eclectic choice of sources avoids the purely technical texts and includes those which Campbell considers to be most useful for historians, archaeologists and those studying ancient technology. The introduction discusses the text and authors, the origins, development and status of surveying and Roman land division. A series of illustrations, diagrams, a glossary of terms and a large bibliography conclude the volume.

The study of ancient Roman land surveyors and the Roman system of property boundaries was carried out in the nineteenth century mainly by German scholars. One of them was Karl Lachmann who published Gromatici Veteres (The Ancient Land Surveyors) [Lachmann 1848], a compilation of texts that address aspects of ancient surveying which are fundamental to Civil Engineering as we know it today. Most of the original texts, as published by Lachmann and with some corrections proposed by Thulin [Thulin 1913], was published together with the English translation by Campbell [Campbell 2000]. A complete re-proposal of Lachmann’s text with the Italian translation was recently proposed by Giacinto Libertini [Libertini 2018]. An important part of this collection of texts, the Liber Coloniarum (The Book of the Colonies), together with a rich cartography illustrating the modern persistences of the ancient agrarian boundaries, was subsequently published by the same author [G. Libertini, Liber Coloniarum - Libro delle Colonie, Istituto di Studi Atellani, Frattamaggiore (Italy), 2018]. In order to allow an understanding of this text for a wider audience, it was necessary to have an English translation, which is offered in this work. The Introduction provides a fascinating description of the ancient Roman surveying and setting of boundary signals. The author has also applied Google Earth® and a special software to many of the Roman settlements in the Lazio and Campania regions to define the property grids (centuriationes and strigationes) that are in Italy from Rome to Nocera Superiore (near Salerno). As with the title of this book, many of the technical descriptions presented here are left in the original Latin. The reader is directed to the Glossary for the meaning of the Latin terms used. Wayne Lorenz, P.E. Wright Paleohydrological Institute Wright Water Engineers, Inc.

A comprehensive account of ancient surveying instruments together with translations of all the ancient sources.

Ancient Perspectives encompasses a vast arc of space and time—Western Asia to North Africa and Europe from the third millennium BCE to the fifth century CE—to explore mapmaking and worldviews in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In each society, maps served as critical economic, political, and personal tools, but there was little consistency in how and why they were made. Much like today, maps in antiquity meant very different things to different people. Ancient Perspectives presents an ambitious, fresh overview of cartography and its uses. The seven chapters range from broad-based analyses of mapping in Mesopotamia and Egypt to a close focus on Ptolemy’s ideas for drawing a world map based on the theories of his Greek predecessors at Alexandria. The remarkable accuracy of Mesopotamian city-plans is revealed, as is the creation of maps by Romans to support the proud claim that their emperor’s rule was global in its reach. By probing the instruments and techniques of both Greek and Roman surveyors, one chapter seeks to uncover how their extraordinary planning of roads, aqueducts, and tunnels was achieved. Even though none of these civilizations devised the means to measure time or distance with precision, they still conceptualized their surroundings, natural and man-made, near and far, and felt the urge to record them by inventive means that this absorbing volume reinterprets and compares.