List of literary descriptions of cities (before 1550)
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Literary descriptions of cities (also known as descriptiones urbium) form a literary genre that originated in Ancient Greek epideictic rhetoric. They can be prose or poetry. Many take the form of an urban eulogy (variously referred to as an encomium urbis, laudes urbium, encomium civis, laus civis, laudes civitatum; or in English: urban or city encomium, panegyric, laudation or praise poem) which praise their subject. Laments to a city's past glories are sometimes also included in the genre. Descriptiones often mix topographical information with abstract material on the spiritual and legal aspects of the town or city, and with social observations on its inhabitants. They generally give a more extended treatment of their urban subject than is found in an encyclopedia or general geographical work. Influential examples include Benedict's Mirabilia Urbis Romae of around 1143.
The earliest ancestor of the literary genre can be found in the New Kingdom Egyptian "praises of the cities", describing in poetic forms e.g. Thebes and Pi-Ramesses.
The Greek rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in the first century AD, was the first to prescribe the form of a eulogy to a city in detail.
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