Posted on Monday 3 October 2005

Designed with convenience for the traveller in mind, the Tabula Peutingeriana is an early road map which charts in astonishing detail the highways and byways of the imperial Roman world.

I had stumbled over this map quite a few times while surfing the net before I was able to work out what it was I was looking at. It's obviously some kind of map but it has a very odd format. As expected, it has marked on it various mountains, rivers towns and cities as well as the network of roads that interconnect them all but it differs markedly from conventional maps in that it uses no system of projection. It's creator was not interested in preserving scale, only connections.

The map severely compressed in the North-South axis which is only 34 centimetres across (13.25 inches) while it's East-West axis sprawls over a massive 6.75 meters (22 feet). Evidently this format was designed for a papyrus scroll and it meant that the map, when rolled up, could be conveniently transported in a carrying case. The map is full of an extraordinary amount of detail which covers everywhere in the known world from the distant and exotic islands of Britain and Ireland all the way to the even more distant and exotic island of Sri Lanka (denoted here by the Greek name Tamprobane).

The map terminates in the Far East with the inscription: Hic Alexander responsum accepit usqi quo Alexander "Here Alexander was given the oracular reply: 'How far, Alexander?'" indicating the place where Alexander the Great was forced to break off his project of conquest and discovery. His soldiers insisted that he turn back at the Indus river rather than pressing on into the unknown territories of India.

The map is extremely old and judging from the main place names it is thought to have been compiled in the fourth century AD but it evidently also draws upon infomation from even older maps which date back at least to the reign of Caesar Augustus.

What had confused me most about this map was that I only ever saw isolated segments of it, never realising that these segments in fact joined up to make a recognisable, though extremely elongated, image of the Eurasian continent. In order to provide you, the reader, with a good overview of this map, I have put together a composite image showing the full length of the scroll. The segmentation is preserved in the form of 14 clickable regions which take you to zoomed in versions of the map in full detail (Please note: each of the zoomed in segments is rotated 90 degrees from the way I have presented it here, running left-to-right rather than top-to-down.)

These images come from Tabula Peutingeriana site at Bibliotecha Augustana which are the best scans I've seen of the map and for a really good written description of the map, as usual, one cannot do better than this one over at the excellent and quite indispensable Henry Davis Ancient Maps site.

UPDATE: I've optimised the graphics on this page to better cope with the increased traffic coming from MonkeyFilter and other sites. It should also make the page quite a bit quicker to download as well.