Documenting the oikoumenê : did 'documents' support the description of the inhabited world (Hellenistic and Imperial periods) ?
Résumé
This chapter investigates the collective attitude towards documentary evidence among ancient geographers by surveying geographical writing and descriptions of the oikoumenê gê from the Hellenistic period onward in order to discern attitudes towards documentary source materials. Ancient authors, in an effort to compile a robust body of geographical knowledge, employed even plants, animals, and objects as documentary material. Ferraris’s theory of the document as social object is inadequate for understanding how the ancient geographers envisioned their sources. Instead, a fundamentally different way of knowing the world emerges from authors like Pliny, Diodorus Siculus, and others, dependent on an expansive, almost universal interpretation of what constitutes a document.
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Histoire
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