Claudius Ptolemaios deciphered ?

[D B Campbell]

Mapping Ptolemy's maps to modern coordinates may be not that simple. See also the articles from e-Perimetron , for example, Angeliki Tsorlini's Spatial distribution of Ptolemy’s Geographia coordinate differences in North Mediterranean eliminating systematic effects

This is a journal that I didn't know about, so many thanks for the reference.

... there might also errors in coordinates and names, some which are impossible to recover. Such errors might have happened early in the manuscript tradition (and thus present in all extant copies) or even in Ptolemy's work (as he was copying from other sources).

It's my understanding that there are rather a lot of manuscripts to collate, but didn't Otto Cunz sort out the text for Germania? (Of course, we all make mistakes sometimes; Ptolemy, Cunz, and me. )

Also, despite what some may think, some of the settlements are quite modest even though Ptolemy called them poleis. There are also known settlements and (administrative) regions which are not on his maps.

All very true. Which makes me wonder at the wisdom of announcing that (e.g.) Salzkotten is 2,000 years old, because Ptolemy names a polis in the approximate neighbourhood. (Or am I misrepresenting the book's researches?)