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Click to enlargeOld Persia and Old India
A page pairing two maps of the ancient world — the empire of the Persians and Parthians, and India Vetus, "Old India" — from the Sanson family's atlas. Here the French school turns its critical eye backward, mapping the India of classical antiquity beside its modern sheets.
Authorship and object
From the rare posthumous Sanson atlas issued by Guillaume Sanson (title-page dated 1697, with maps as late as 1709), in French and Latin. The volume deliberately sets ancient against modern geography — géographie ancienne et nouvelle — a hallmark of the learned French approach.
Mapping the classical subcontinent
India Vetus reconstructs India as the Greek and Roman geographers described it, with classical regions, rivers and peoples rather than contemporary kingdoms. It is the scholarly counterpart to the Mughal-empire maps: the same publisher mapping the same land twice — once as antiquity knew it, once as the present did.
The gaze
The pairing is itself the argument. To the French geographer, knowing India meant knowing both its ancient and its modern geography and holding the two in deliberate comparison. India is approached as an object of erudition — studied from the library as much as from the sea.