The topography of ancient Rome is the description of the built environment of the city of ancient Rome. It is a multidisciplinary field of study that draws on archaeology, epigraphy, cartography and philology. The word 'topography' here has its older sense of a description of a place,[1] now often considered to be local history,[2] rather than its usual modern meaning, the study of landforms.
The classic English-language work of scholarship is A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929), written by Samuel Ball Platner, completed and published after his death by Thomas Ashby. New finds and interpretations have rendered many of Platner and Ashby's conclusions unreliable, but when used with other sources the work still offers insights and complementary information.
In 1992, Lawrence Richardson published A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, which builds on Platner and Ashby.[3] The six-volume, multilingual Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae (1993‑2000) is the major modern work in the field.
- ^ "topography (1a)". Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 1913.
- ^ "Topography as the study of place - GIS Wiki | The GIS Encyclopedia". wiki.gis.com. Retrieved 2022-04-17.
- ^ This is the assessment of Bill Thayer, a private scholar whose LacusCurtius site has been an online resource for ancient Rome since 1997. For a perspective on Richardson's book for the general reader, see Thayer's review.