The scholarly engagement with Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographike Hyphegesis, particularly regarding the territory of Germania Magna, has faced a fundamental paradox for centuries. While the mathematical coordinates in Ptolemy’s atlas suggest an apparently precise mapping, the described landmarks, river courses, and settlement points can often only be reconciled with the present-day topography of Central Europe through considerable distortion. Traditional research has usually resolved this problem by assuming measurement errors on the part of the ancient sources or by allowing generous interpretive latitude in the identification of hydronyms and toponyms. The researcher Sven Mildner, however, takes a radically different approach in his work: he postulates that the Ptolemaic data are not primarily erroneous, but that the modern interpretation rests on a fundamental misconception about the stability of the European landscape and an incorrect cartographic projection.¹