Manuscript Tradition
A Geography comprises two parts: Book one, a discussion of the data and of the methods used; and Books 2–5, an atlas. The original work included maps, but due to the difficulties involved in copying them by hand, the original maps have fallen out of the manuscript transmission. Maps redrawn from the coordinates in the text have been re-added to medieval copies of the work
Arabic writer al-Mas'udi, while writing around 956, mentioned a colored map of the Geography which had 4530 cities and over 200 mountains. Byzantine monk Maximus Planudes found a copy of the Geography in 1295, and since there were no maps in his copy, he drew his own based on the coordinates found in the text. In 1397 a copy was given to Palla Strozzi in Florence by Emanuel Chrysoloras.
An oldest copy of the work, the 13th-century Codex Seragliensis GI 57 was found in the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. It was used as the base of a new edition of the work in 2006. This new edition was used to "decode" Ptolemy's coordinates of Books 2 and 3 by an interdisciplinary team of TU Berlin, presented in publications in 2010 and 2012.
Relevant research on Ptolemy's Geography manuscripts and printed editions, concerning the Geography versions coordinates, is carried out since 1998 by members of the cartography group, school of surveying engineering, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. See, e.g. selective papers in the web journal "e-Perimetron"
The first Latin translation – Geographia Claudii Ptolemaei – was made in 1409/10 by Florentine Giacomo da Scarperia (latinized name Jacobus Angelus).
Read more about this topic: Geography (Ptolemy)
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