1502 STRABON. - Rare post-incunable 1502 sixth edition of Strabo’s Geographica

Rare post-incunable 1502 sixth edition of Strabo’s Geographica, translated from Ancient Greek to Latin as De Situ Orbis by Guarino da Verona and Gregorio Tifernate.

The text contains woodcut initials and a table of names and subjects. Imprint from colophon. 

Edited by Antonio Mancinelli (as appears in the preface dated 1494).

The first ten books of Strabo’s work are here translated by Guarino Veronese (Guarino da Verona) (1374 – 1460), while the remaining seven books are translated by Gregorio Tifernate (1414 – 1462), both were influential humanist figures of the early Italian Renaissance.



Strabo, who died around 23, wrote an immense, precise Greek treatise on geography, as he was a firsthand witness: he went to Asia Minor, Armenia, Sardinia, Egypt, Corinth, Cyrene, and traveled partly in Italy. He also collected testimonies from others, such as on Etna. Eratosthenes, Polybius, Artemidoros, Posidonius, Apollodorus of Artemita for Parthian Asia, Demetrius of Scepsis and Apollodorus of Athens for Greece.

Books III to Book XVII, are devoted to the descriptive geography of regions of the empire.
Book XI of his Geographica includes a survey of northern and central Asia. The region he knew as Sogdiana, the country between the Oxus (Amu Darya) and the Iaxartes (Syr Darya), corresponds to the heart of modern Uzbekistan. Bactria lies to the south, Chorasmia to the west, and the steppe of the Sacae and Massagetae to the north and east.
Strabo describes a landscape of river valleys and oases surrounded by desert and steppe, and a mix of settled and nomadic peoples. He records how nomadic tribes, whom he names the Asii, Pasiani, Tochari and Sacarauli, overran the Greek kingdom of Bactria. He also repeats the debate over where the two great rivers ended. Ancient writers often assumed they flowed into the Caspian, but they actually drained toward the Aral Sea.
Sogdiana and Bactria (11.11): the heart of it. Sogdiana lies between the Oxus (Amu Darya) and Iaxartes (Syr Darya), roughly the core of modern Uzbekistan, with Maracanda (Samarkand) among the places he names, and he draws on accounts of Alexander’s campaigns here.
Sacae and Massagetae (11.8): the nomadic peoples beyond the Iaxartes, plus his account of the tribes (Asii, Pasiani, Tochari, Sacarauli) who overran Greek Bactria.
Margiane and Aria (11.10): the territory just to the south and west.
Oxus and Laxartes: the rivers and their supposed courses toward the Caspian Sea are discussed across these chapters.
Chorasmia(Khwarezm), in western modern Uzbekistan, appears only briefly, in the context of the Massagetae and the Oxus.


Strabo compiled his account from earlier Greek writers, especially the historians of Alexander the Great and geographers such as Eratosthenes and Apollodorus of Artemita. Alexander’s campaigns of 329-327 BC gave Greek readers their first detailed knowledge of the region. His army crossed the Oxus, took Maracanda (Samarkand) and fought a long, difficult war against the Sogdian leader Spitamenes. It also founded a city on the Iaxartes, which the Greeks treated as the edge of the civilized world.

Provenance: Kühnholtz-Lordat (with engraved ex-libris).

Strabo (Strabon) (c. 64 BC-c. AD 24)