A Complete Body of Ancient Geography. ... Containing [list of 13 maps]: Orbis Romani pars Orientalis; Orbis Romani pars Occidentalis; Orbis Veteribus Notus; Gallia; Italia; Graecia; Asia Minor et Syria; Palestina; Aegyptus; Britannia Romana; Graecia pars Septentreionalis & pars Meridionalis; Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the British Isles ...

First English edition; folio (555 x 393 mm), letterpress title-page and thirteen engraved maps, twelve double-page, in original outline colour. Maps fine. Recent half calf with marbled paper-covered boards, red morocco label with gilt lettering to spine. Modern binding. London : Robert Sayer & John Bennett,

First Edition of this important, popular and much reprinted classical atlas, drawing on the work of the great French cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville (1697-1792), Geographer to the French king, and pre-eminent cartographer of the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Best known for his world atlas, the Atlas Generale, 1755 (with later printings), d’Anville also published the Géographie Ancienne Abrégé, an atlas of classical geography, from 1756 onwards.

An excellent, and influential, atlas, it proved the model for Sayer and Bennett’s English version, the Complete Body of Ancient Geography. Sayer and Bennett reproduced the ten maps from d’Anville, revising by inserting the parallel modern name in the body of the maps. They also added a map of Greece after Guillaume Delisle on two sheets, and a map of the British Isles, derived from the map in Dr. John Horsley’s Britannia Romana or the Roman Antiquities of Britain, 1732.

This edition is unrecorded in ESTC; this copy has an apparently unrecorded (earlier?) variant title-page, omitting the text ‘... The Whole improved by inserting the Modern Names of Places under the Ancient ...’ and is without the street number of the Sayer and Bennett shop in the imprint.

References: cf. ESTC T207246; cf. Shirley, T.ANV-4a & T-ANV-4b.  

Stock Code: 223846