worldhistory

worldhistory, 11 months ago

@histodons If I asked you to imagine the Roman Empire, you’d probably envision something like this:

worldhistory, 11 months ago

@histodons But the oldest maps of the Roman Empire that show the empire this way date from the Renaissance, like this one by Abraham Ortellius, who made this map in 1606:

worldhistory, 11 months ago

@histodons This isn't because Romans didn't understand geography. They knew the world was round, for example. In fact, the Romans sometimes used the image of the globe to express their worldly power. Here’s a coin from Constantine’s time, showing the god Sol Invictus holding the globe in his hand. The point isn’t exactly subtle.

worldhistory, 11 months ago

@histodons Ptolemy was the most famous geographer of Roman times, writing a book that we now generally refer to as the *Geography. *It is, in many ways, a guide to making maps. Most of the work is a sort of database of some 8,000 locations and their coordinates. Medieval maps were often based on Ptolemy's instructions, as you can see below. But we don't have any Ptolemaic maps that survive from ancient times, nor is there evidence that Ptolemy made maps.

worldhistory, 11 months ago

@histodons So what sources remain that show us how the Romans may have mapped out their world?

Instead of maps , Romans would have used itineraria, lists of the places a traveler might encounter along a certain road. Many itineraria are catalogs of the milestones that the Roman government placed on its road network.
One of the more famous itineraries is found on a set of cups that were excavated in Vicarello; they describe the route from Cadiz, Spain to Rome.

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worldhistory, 11 months ago

@histodons In the early 200s CE, the emperor Septimius Severus commissioned a massive (60 feet by 45 feet!) marble plan of the city of Rome. Though it was not to scale, it showed the location and floor plan — down to the placement of individual columns — of every major building in central Rome. Sadly, like a lot of Roman marble structures, the map was torn apart by medieval people scavenging for building materials. We only have a few fragments, which give us a tantalizing glimpse:

worldhistory, 11 months ago

@histodons Another fascinating “map” fragment from the 200s CE comes from a soldier’s shield, discovered in Syria in the 1920s. It’s really hard to see, but etched into the leather of this soldier’s equipment is the route he must have taken during his military service from Byzantium north along the coast of the Black Sea.

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worldhistory, 11 months ago

@histodons The closest thing we have to an ancient map of the Roman Empire is something called the Tabula Peutingeriana.
It's not from Roman times. It dates to the 1200s, but it seems to be a medieval copy of a map from the late Roman period, perhaps the 400s CE. It’s less a map of the empire than a schematic diagram of the Roman roads, kind of like a subway-system map. This portion shows the Croatian coast, the bottom of the “boot” of Italy, Sicily, and the coast of Northern Africa.

worldhistory, 11 months ago

@histodons Even though we think of the Roman Empire as a splotch of color on a map, a territory with fixed borders, it’s not clear that the Romans did. We have no evidence that they ever produced a “map of the empire,” clearly showing what they controlled and what they didn’t. Rather than envisioning land masses under their control, Romans may have thought in ways reflected by their *itineraria, understanding their empire *in terms of lists of places, lines of march, and networks of roads.