by Manolis Manoledakis

Righas’ Charta, a very important product of Modern Greek Enlightenment and cartography,follows the tradition of the western European “post-ptolemaic” maps, but with the innovative element of the deliberate projection – in many ways – of Greek antiquity. It would be very interesting to know if Charta, which contains a lot of ancient Greek sites, could possibly constitute an important aid for the researcher of ancient topography, for example in the identification of ancient cities whose positions remain until nowadays unknown. In this paper a short factual approach to this question is tried, based on the case of central Macedonia. For this particular area Righas followed strictly the map of G. Delisle, based mainly on Herodotus, Ptolemy and Strabo, but on other ancient sources as well. After the examination of the positions of the known sites of Charta and a comparison with the relevant archaeological data, it turns out that unfortunately Righas’ map is not especially reliable for someone who would try to seek the areas of Charta’s unidentified sites on the actual map.

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