Imperia Antiqua, Pars Orientalis

Circa 1787

Copper engraving on paper

Print size: 14.25 x 9.75 in (36.5 x 25 cm)
Sheet size: 17 x 11.75 in (43 x 30 cm)
Folded size: 8.46 x 11.81 in (21.5 x 30 cm)

Rigobert Bonne’s Ancient India — Classical Geography, Alexander’s Eastern Conquests, and Enlightenment Cartographic Scholarship (Circa 1787)

Rigobert Bonne’s Imperia Antiqua, Pars Orientalis, engraved circa 1787 for Bonne and Nicolas Desmarest’s celebrated Atlas Encyclopédique, represents a highly refined Enlightenment reconstruction of ancient India and the Eastern world as understood at the time of Alexander the Great’s campaigns. Depicting the subcontinent and the Bay of Bengal through the lens of classical antiquity, the map situates India at the threshold of the Macedonian conquest of the Punjab in the 320s BCE—the last major theatre of Alexander’s eastern expansion before his death.

Bonne (1727–1795), one of the most significant cartographers of late eighteenth-century France, occupies a pivotal position in the evolution of scientific mapmaking. Working in Paris as Hydrographe du Roi, he belonged to a generation committed to empirical clarity, rational design, and the systematic organisation of geographic knowledge. Emerging from the methodological reforms of Delisle and d’Anville, Bonne’s work privileges legibility and critically evaluated sources over Baroque ornament, reflecting the Enlightenment conviction that geography could be progressively refined through measurement and reason.

This plate exemplifies Bonne’s distinctive historical method: it combines modern geographic structure with ancient Latin terminology, rendering places and peoples as they appeared in Greek and Roman accounts of Alexander’s conquests. The Punjab occupies the upper left, while the Bay of Bengal and Burma extend eastward, with mountains, rivers, settlements, and kingdoms carefully noted according to classical frameworks. At the same time, the map retains the imaginative residue of antiquity: surrounding regions include fantastical ethnographic references, such as the anthropophagi (cannibals) reputed to inhabit Upper Burma.

The engraving is exceptionally rich in technical and scholarly apparatus. It includes seven separate scales, multiple units of measurement, and a diagram of compass winds derived from Aristotle and updated by Pliny the Elder. Latitude and longitude are provided from both the Ferro Meridian and the Paris Meridian, underscoring the map’s dual identity as a classical reconstruction and a modern scientific document.

Issued as Map No. 7 in the Atlas Encyclopédique—one of the most successful French atlases of the late eighteenth century—this work offers collectors and institutions a compelling insight into how India was conceptualised on the eve of nineteenth-century survey cartography: as a region of profound historical depth, classical memory, and imperial geographic enquiry within the Enlightenment worldview.

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