Ancient Roman Mapquest (ca. 13th C AD)
The Tabula Peutingeriana, or “Peutinger Table” is an ancient Roman road map that actually shows the road network of the entire Roman Empire – all the way across Europe, Asia, and in parts of North Africa. The map was created in the 13th century by a monk from Colmar, and was drawn on a scroll of parchment.
The map itself was made up of eleven sections assembled together, and when laid out it measures approximately 6.75 meters long – and all evidence points to this map being a Medieval reproduction of an original that was created in the 3rd or 4th century AD. The art of the map is very schematic and stylized, with highly distorted landmasses that seem to suggest the map’s use was primarily for the information on distances between settlements – which is given right on the map – and recognition of major intersecting roads, rivers, mountains, and so forth.
Some of the Roman Empire’s most important cities – Antioch, Constantinople, and Rome – are denoted on the map with different symbols to indicate their importance, and the lack of the Iberian Peninsula in the western area of the map seems to suggest that the original copy of the map had a twelfth section that would have included this portion of the Empire.
The Tabula Peutingeriana seems to have been based on ‘itineraries’, or meaning the destination points along the Roman roads, since that would have allowed travelers to know how far they needed to travel – approximately – between each town. The roads are roughly parallel in their representation, and each city and its size/comparative scale is demarcated by one of several hundred place symbols – these can be anything from small building icons to elaborate portraits of the large cities.
An interesting feature of the roads along the map are little ‘hook’ marks that appear every so often – these hooks were actually representations of rest stops. The distance between each set of hooks indicated one day’s worth of travel, and sometimes this would include a little icon of a building that showed there was an inn or hotel at certain locations where a traveler could stay – more luxurious accommodations were shown by icons that had large courtyards in the picture.
The people who would have used this map were either travelers – typically those who were making a long journey or who traveled often – or couriers, who spent each and every day traversing the roads across the Roman Empire and beyond.
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