Old Travel Guides ( Really Old Travel Guides )

A book buyer recently asked us to identify the first published travel guide. Well, the earliest travel guidebook that we could name was Descriptions of Greece by the Roman author Pausanias. Written in 160 AD for rich Roman tourists, Descriptions of Greece was a multi-volume guidebook that explored towns, temples and cultural sites in extraordinary detail. Amazingly, the archeologist Heinrich Schliemann reportedly used Pausanias' old guide to uncover ruins in Mycenae.