Re-drawing the Map? the capacity to ‘‘see’’ indirectly, without moving from the spot, an infinity of
images of documents, artefacts, art-works, buildings, and landscapes. The in-
tensity of visualisation which Mikhail Rostovtzeff (–) achieved only
by dedicated travel,^9 and by the inspection of sites and of the contents of
innumerable local museums, can (potentially) now be achieved by anyone
through a computer screen. None the less, at another level, nothing can sub-
stitute for the undefinable lessons of being there, of actually experiencing
different environments.
The fact that we can now have a direct apprehension, whether physi-
cally and in person, or through images, print, or information technology, has
enormous consequences which we have not in reality fully grasped. Hun-
dreds of thousands of documents, whether inscribed on stone or bronze, or
written on portable objects like ostraca or on perishable materials (papyri
or parchments), millions of coins, displaying both images and writing, mil-
lions of artefacts of innumerable kinds, and thousands of (to varying degrees)
standing buildings, or of excavated or unexcavated sites, can now be encoun-
tered directly, in one or other of the senses mentioned.
A New Approach to Ancient Languages?
The actual structure of our approach—or of our many different approaches—
to the ancient world has, however, not been transformed by these develop-
ments to anything like the extent that it could, and in principle should. Take
for instance dictionaries or lexicons of Latin and Greek. All of those which
are currently available are based fundamentally on the relevant language as
found in medieval manuscripts of literary texts, texts which then came to
be printed in critical editions from the Renaissance onwards. But if the pri-
mary function of such a dictionary or lexicon were seen as being instead to
serve as an aid to reading the millions of words of Greek or Latin which
are now accessible directly, as preserved on papyri, inscriptions, coins, and
other media, there would have to be a completely new start, with individual
dictionary entries being based primarily on documents, secondarily on an-
cient (papyrus and parchment) texts of literary works, and only in the third
place on the vocabulary and grammar found in texts printed from medieval
manuscripts. To be carried out in a fully purist fashion, the entries would also
. For Rostovtzeff and Franz Cumont, and the background which they brought to the
excavation of Dura-Europos, see now the evocative and fascinating article by G. Bongard-
Levin and Yu. Litvinenko, ‘‘Dura-Europos: From Cumont to Rostovtzeff,’’Mediterraneo
Antico (): .