On the digital placement of Aegae, the first capital of ancient Macedonia, according to Ptolemy's Geographia

Abstract

The position of Aegae, the first capital of ancient Macedonia, detains the archaeological and historical research since the 19 century. The impressive discoveries of Manolis Andronikos in 1978 have lead to the view that Aegae was situated in the archaeological site near the modern village of Vergina. However, during the last years this theory is not being unanimously accepted. The lack of relevant inscriptions forces the scholars to search for data in other archaeological founds and the ancient sources. One of these sources, of important scientific value, is the Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy. In this treatise Ptolemy gives the coordinates of ca 8000 ancient sites of the world that was known to him. Among these sites is Aegae. It is important to stress that in the first of the eight books that constitute Geographia, Ptolemy explains in detail all the methods he uses in his work, most of which remind us of the method of another pioneer scientist of ancient Greece, Thucydides. In this paper, coordinate-wised digital methods are applied in order to locate Ptolemy’s Aegae, with respect to surrounding control point coordinates which are archaeologically assured as common in Geographia and in our modern cartographies. The estimated results are critically discussed, with respect to existing archaeological scenarios.

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