This is a presentation of a set of spatial data which was created during a digitisation project conducted in 2022-2023 in the National Library of Finland. It is a corpus consisting of place names from the 15th century manuscript work of Ptolemaic maps, some 5000 in total, recorded in the library database. My aim is to invite scholars to develop and make use of the data and suggest some ways of georeferencing the places in the maps.

The maps can be browsed and the place names can be searched in the library's search service kansalliskirjasto.finna.fi. The digitised maps are available on the digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi platform. Both services, Finna and digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi, provide an API that enables processing of the data.

The work in question is titled at some point Cosmographia and it consists of 27 maps drawn after Geographia Hyphegesis by Claudius Ptolemy. The manuscript was most probably produced by the workshop of Nicolaus Germanus (ca. 1420-ca. 1490) in Florence during the late 15th century. The maps are bound together with a work La sfera by a Florentine merchant and humanist Gregorio Dati. Both works in this manuscript, Cosmographia and La sfera, are products of the same hand and the same workshop. The work including the maps has raised only minimal scholarly attention. In 2014, Chet Van Duzer published an article focusing on the non-Ptolemaic legends added to the maps. He makes comparisons with other copies from the same period in other collections. Before him, there were no studies which would have been focused on the maps of the manuscript. The work of Dati has been an interest of only a few as well.

According to van Duzer, the maps in this manuscript belong to the first group of the three of Ptolemies produced in Florence by Nicolaus Germanus and his workshop. These maps are less luxurious copies than the other known copies in other public collections. However, in the maps in question here, there is an unusually high amount of added information on the maps: legends and place names. This feature seems to be almost unique. There are both Ptolemaic and non-Ptolemaic place names, indicating that they derive from the Ptolemy’s text and from other sources. In addition to the place names, there are short mentions and longer explanations about exotic animals, mythical monsters and peoples, among other subjects, which are not mentioned by Ptolemy at all.

Therefore, the corpus of the place names was created among the digitisation project mentioned above. While the metadata of each map was created by cataloguing them in MARC21 format in the library database, all the place names and legends were extracted from maps as well. This resulted 27 bibliographic records of the category map, with a large amount of the field 522, a note on geographical coverage. The highest amount of place names, over 600, was recorded in the map of Asia minor (https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/teos/binding/2767605?page=37). Also, the maps of Hispania, Greece, Italy, and another one of Asia minor, are dense with spatial information. Not surprisingly, the smallest number of place names, 80 in total, was recorded on the map of Tabrobana insula (https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/teos/binding/2767605?page=59). Around 100 place names were also recorded on two maps depicting Sarmatia, the regions today around and north from the Black Sea, Azov Sea, and Caspian Sea (https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/teos/binding/2767605?page=39 and https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/teos/binding/2767605?page=39).

The additional information on maps, which Van Duzer discusses in his article - the legends on e.g. animals, peoples, or natural resources - were also saved on the bibliographical records of the maps, in the field 500, a general note. The number of these supplementary legends increases on maps depicting the African continent and India; the highest number of the legends are in the map of North Africa, 25 in total, with an average number of toponyms, 310 (https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/teos/binding/2767605?page=35). As van Duzer has noticed, this follows both the ancient and medieval traditions, in where these areas are seen as sources for miracles and wonders. Generally, those maps rich with toponyms often lack the legends. This is not surprising. The regions were considered important during the Ptolemy's time and they were well known also to the 15th century reader.

These maps have not been georeferenced to correspond modern digital map bases, but an effective way of studying the maps and their spatial information would be an ontology which would preserve the historical dimension of named places. Enriching the vocabulary with coordinates, languages, time periods, and other linked information, such as Wikidata and other thesauri would allow studies not limited only to spatial humanities but also for instance language studies or onomastics.

Today, the manuscript belongs to the Nordenskiöld Collection, which was collected by scholar and explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld in late 19th century. The collection consists of early cartography and maps, and literature on geography, history, and travel. This collection provides plenty of opportunities for spatial humanities as well.

Bibliography:
Federico Botana, Learning Through Images in the Italian Renaissance. Illustrated Manuscripts and Education in Quattrocento Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020.
Chet Van Duzer 2014, “Bring on the Monsters and Marvels: Non-Ptolemaic Legends on Manuscript Maps of Ptolemy’s Geography”, in Viator 45: 303-334; https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.1.103923

Links:
Manuscript on the library's search service: https://kansalliskirjasto.finna.fi/Record/fikka.5621944
Digital copy: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fd2023-00032457
Digital Ptolemy Atlases collection: digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/ptolemaios
Details for the APIs, see:
https://api.finna.fi/swagger-ui/?url=%2Fapi%2Fv1%3Fswagger#/Record/get_record
https://wiki.helsinki.fi/xwiki/bin/view/Comhis/Comhis/Interfaces%20of%20digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/