Peutinger Map Research Articles

How Did Early Modern Scholars Study Early Maps?

The two standard Anglophone historiographies of the history of cartography (Skelton 1972, Harley 1987) situated the field’s origins in the early modern era, or even in the later Middle Ages. Yet “history” and “cartography” are both products of the profound changes in the intellectual foundations and institutions of European knowledge practices in the decades to either side of 1800. By contrast, this essay explores how early modern scholars variously engaged with maps from the past in terms of contemporary knowledge practices. [Part 1] It first outlines the early modern meanings of “history” and “geography” and then reviews how early modern scholars engaged with early maps in three distinct ways. Classical scholars used the Peutinger map and Ptolemy’s Geography to identify locations of ancient places in order to improve their comprehension of Classical texts. [Part 2] Some geographers wrote histories of voyages and travels that related past routes to contemporary maps, and others wrote historical narratives of the compilation of encyclopedic texts and maps of regional and world knowledge. [Part 3] Antiquaries opportunistically described and at times reproduced a variety of maps, charts, and plans that came to their attention, but without active searches for early maps. Overall, I demonstrate that before 1775 there was neither a systematic approach taken to the study of maps from the past nor any hint of the core methodology that would be adopted by the first historiographical mode of map history as it developed after 1830.

Paul’s Map and Territory: Rethinking the Work of the Apostle in Light of Ancient Cartography

Abstract Paul had a clear understanding of how his calling and his work mapped onto geography. In contexts where he felt that others were encroaching on his territory, as in Galatians and 2 Corinthians, Paul could be very angry and defensive. Likewise, when Paul was writing to people in territories that he did not consider part of his purview, such as in Romans, he was deferential and submissive. In all three cases—in Galatians and 2 Corinthians when Paul was being defensive about his territory, and in Romans when he was being deferential—Paul used a particular word, κλίµα, to designate geography—a word he never used in any other context. This article puts this observation in conversation with ancient mapping, which relied on “process descriptions” of space and place rather than “state descriptions.” That is, ancient cartography privileged the process of movement or travel, and in contrast to most modern mapping, ancient maps didn’t usually make use of any external system of reference. One particular map, the Peutinger Map, helps illustrate this phenomenon. Understanding how ancient maps organized space, we can begin to understand Paul’s notions of territory and the way they determined which places he felt compelled to visit. By knowing something about Paul’s maps and geographies, we can make sense of his language in Romans 15, where territory played a pivotal role in his self-understanding as an apostle and in his trajectory across the Roman world, “from Jerusalem and as far around as Illyricum,” but also onward to Spain and to the end of the world.

The Medieval Peutinger Map: Imperial Roman Revival in a German Empire, by Emily Albu

The Medieval Peutinger Map: Imperial Roman Revival in a German Empire, by Emily Albu

The medieval Peutinger map: imperial Roman revival in a German empire

1. Introduction 2. Roman roads and Roman perceptions of space 3. The battle of the maps 4. Christian maps and the Peutinger Map 5. German emperors, crusades, and an imperial map 6. Images and the medieval map 7. Conclusion.

Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered by Richard J. A. Talbert (review)

Reviewed by: Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered by Richard J. A. Talbert Jennifer Trimble Richard J. A. Talbert. Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xviii + 357 pp. 7 black-and-white figs., 26 black-and-white plates, 1 table. Cloth, $90.00. The Peutinger Map is a cartographic prodigy. It compresses the Roman Empire and parts of Asia into a ribbon 6.72 meters long but only 0.33 meters tall. The mapmaker removed open water, turned some landmasses on their sides, and squashed others almost flat. What are scholars to do with a map, “si peu correcte et si bizarre,” in the disparaging words of Johann Casimir von Häffelin (36)? Adding to the difficulties, the map we have is a medieval copy, several steps removed from an ancient original. And yet, this is the only map of the Roman world to survive from antiquity; it is enormously important. Richard Talbert has now produced the first full-length study of the Peutinger map in more than ninety years, and with it the first ever photographic presentation of the map in color. Uniquely qualified as the editor of the Barrington Atlas, he draws deeply on Brian Harley’s and David Woodward’s insistence on understanding maps within their own cultural contexts. In five narrative chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, nine appendices, endnotes, bibliography, index and gazetteer, and extensive online resources, Talbert makes, I think, four major contributions to the scholarship on this map and to ancient cartography. First (chap. 1), Talbert provides an archaeology of the scholarship since the map’s rediscovery around 1500, when it first appears in the record as a bequest to the humanist Konrad Peutinger. Talbert deploys an impressive breadth and depth of research (cf. apps. 1–4 and 6); inter alia, he restores the reputation of Von Scheyb’s mid-eighteenth-century edition. Especially striking is his demonstration of the massive challenges faced by successive editors who tried to provide accurate reproductions of the map; this in turn has been a major obstacle to any kind of systematic commentary or analysis. Case in point: Konrad Miller’s 1916 publication, until now the authoritative modern resource, includes a black-and-white reproduction of the map at two-thirds size—but this was a lithographic reproduction, not photographic, that drew heavily on Scheyb’s engravings (62). These difficulties highlight the groundbreaking importance of the new digital presentation. Talbert’s second contribution is a detailed cartographic analysis of the Peutinger map as a map. Chapter 2, co-authored with Martin Steinmann, is a physical analysis of how, when, and where the surviving copy was made. Parchment sheets were first glued together and the map was then drawn onto them. The water features were painted on first; mountain ranges and cities came next; third were the red lines connecting settlements; writing was added last. Analysis of the letterforms places the Peutinger map in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, perhaps in south Germany or Alsace. In Chapter 3, Talbert then examines the different features of the surviving map in turn: the principal landscape elements, the line work, the nature and placement of the letters and numerals, and the symbols employed, especially for settlements. Oddly, there are no illustrations [End Page 159] in the text and no mention of the enormously helpful illustrations available online: http://www.cambridge.org/us/talbert/talbertdatabase/symbolclass.html. Entirely new in the map’s scholarship is Talbert’s serious attention to the use of color. Only then does Talbert tackle the map’s famous route network (108–21). Modern scholars have assumed that the original map was practical in purpose and have focused on the red lines and numerical distances that link settlements across the map. Talbert persuasively rejects both this assumption and this focus. He explores the map’s relationship to the third- and fourth-century Antonine and Bordeaux itineraries (see also table 1, pp. 158–61), but he points out that the routes and distances on the Peutinger map are not always reliable. There are no total distances provided and no distinctions between more or less direct routes; there are almost no...

Benjamin Rubin. Review of "Rome's World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered" by Richard J. A. Talbert.

Benjamin Rubin. Review of "Rome's World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered" by Richard J. A. Talbert.

Words from the well at Gallo-Roman Châteaubleau

No better demonstration of the general opacity of Gaulish exists than the largely undeciphered eleven-line-long inscription on a tile from the Roman-era settlement at Chateaubleau (Seine-et-Marne). This site, perhaps to be identified with the town Riobe from the Peutinger map,1 has been the source of several finds of inscriptions on tiles, but none is so long and difficult as that which was discovered in 1997 in the remains of an enclosed well (F25) in Zone 6 of the Grands Jardins section of the Chateaubleau excavations.

Rome's world: the Peutinger map reconsidered

Rome's world: the Peutinger map reconsidered

Viewing Rome from the Roman Empires

AbstractTwelfth-century German and Byzantine emperors vied with each other—and with the popes in Rome—for imperial status, each of the three seeing himself as the legitimate heir of ancient Roman imperium. From the court at Constantinople, historians Anna Komnene and John Kinnamos leveled a venomous critique against the west, surveying Rome through the lens of religious disputes, Crusade, and the hated Latin presence in the East. The Byzantine narratives have left a gritty view of their contemporary Rome, a violent and cruel city of illicit popes and anti-popes, anarchy, and barbarism. The Peutinger map, by contrast, seems but an innocent relic of the past, a map of the inhabited world as known to the pagan Romans. Typically considered an ancient Roman artifact and product of Roman culture, the surviving map actually dates from the very end of the long twelfth century. Produced in Swabia, it continued the anti-papal assault as a fresh salvo in a long-lived Battle of the Maps between Church and secular imperium. This display map, like its lost prototype, advertised the supreme authority of Roman imperial power with claims much more venerable than those of the papacy. Its visual narrative implicitly contradicted the power of papal Rome by foregrounding ancient Rome as the centerpiece of an intricately connected oikoumene, a world that should be ruled by Rome’s German heirs. For Germans as for Byzantines, Rome still mattered. Even while assailing a resurgent imperial papacy, neither secular emperor nor their courts could ignore the power exercised by pagan Rome and papal Rome over twelfth-century imaginations.

Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map reconsidered by Richard A. Talbert (review)

Reviewed by: Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map reconsidered by Richard A. Talbert Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen Richard A. Talbert, assisted by Nora Harris, Gannon Hubbard, David O’Brien and Graham Shepherd, with a contribution by Martin Steinmann. Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map reconsidered. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2010. Pp. xviii + 357. CDN $91.95. ISBN 9780521764803. Students of the classical world are accustomed to classify the texts and artifacts that form the basis of our research by type, genre, style, material or period, into neat categories defined and refined by generations of tidy-minded scholars. The document forming the subject of this book, however, eludes all attempts at categorization. It combines elements of text and image, road map and road-book, yet it is neither one nor the other. Its purpose is disputed: was it intended for journey planning or as ornamentation? Its original dimensions are unknown, since part of the scroll had already been lost before the present copy, measuring 6.94 meters in length by 0.33 meters in height, was produced at some time around the year 1200. According to the view of Theodor Mommsen and others, the original was derived from the wall map of Agrippa (late first century bc) while Emily Albu has recently argued that it was compiled as late as the ninth century ad. Today, the document is formally known as the Codex—which it is not—Vindobonensis 324, slightly less formally as the Tabula Peutingeriana after its onetime owner, Konrad Peutinger (1465-1547). Nothing is known about the original creator(s); Konrad Miller’s attempt to identify him as the Castorius cited by the Ravenna cosmographer earned the ridicule of many later scholars, including the authors of the present volume (133-34). Given the many uncertainties surrounding the Tabula Peutingeriana, not to mention the acerbity of the scholarly debates it has engendered, Richard Talbert and his collaborators deserve our admiration for embarking on a ten-year voyage of discovery through the world of the anonymous cartographer(s). The present volume is one product of this endeavor; another is an online [End Page 145] database, to which appendices 7 through 9 (196-286) provide a user’s guide. The larger part of the book is devoted to the origin, reception and purpose of what the authors call the Peutinger Map (henceforth PM). This is in itself a programmatic statement. Whereas most recent studies have interpreted the PM as an itinerarium pictum or route diagram, this book returns to the earlier view that the PM is a true work of cartography, i.e. an attempt at depicting the earth’s surface as a graphic image. The chapters follow an inverse chronological sequence, the first and longest (10-72) tracing the modern history of the PM since its acquisition by Konrad Peutinger and supplemented by appendices 1-6. This is followed by a brief, but rich chapter (73-85) on the medieval copy: its material, its paleography, date and place of origin (co-authored with Martin Steinmann). In Chapters 3 on “design and character” (86-122) and 4 on “recovery of the original from the surviving copy” (123-32), we move closer to Antiquity and by Chapter 5, “The Original Map” (133-57) we have reached the late Roman world in which the archetype of the PM was created. The concluding chapter discusses “the map’s place in Classical and Medieval cartography”. The book offers a number of new insights and provocative ideas, especially in Chapter 5 where Richard Talbert attempts to reconstruct the format and context of the PM’s archetype. The majority opinion among scholars holds that our twelfth-century copy reproduces a map of the later fourth century whose peculiarly elongated shape was dictated by the need to fit it onto a papyrus scroll. Talbert does not question the late fourth-century date of the version transmitted to posterity, but contends that this in its turn was based on an earlier archetype, a wall map produced under the Tetrarchy and probably displayed in the apse of an imperial audience chamber. He hypothesizes (146) that it would be natural for the apse of an aula to possess not just one...

The Ruin at Thésée

The aim of this note is to bring to the attention of English readers a Roman building of large size, whose impressive ruins are well preserved, but whose purpose is uncertain and existence little known.The Roman road from Tours to Bourges ran along the north bank of the river Cher and for much of its length is followed by the modern N76. Two settlements or posting-stations lying on this road and marked on the Peutinger map under the names Gabris and Tasciaca can be located at the villages of Giévres and Thésée respectively. At this latter place, otherwise called Thézée or Tézée, 31 miles east of Tours, the main road, following the course of the Roman route, runs close beside the river, with the railway line separating them and low, bare hills rising immediately to the north. The towns of Montrichard to the west and St. Aignan on the east are respectively 4 and 5 miles away, and the village lies in the Loir-et-Cher département.

Roman Milestones in Cyrenaica

The ancient coast road of Libya which runs close to the shore from Berenice (Benghasi) to Teuchira (Tocra) and Ptolemais (Tolmeita) later swings inland to reach Cyrene, and climbs to the second plateau of the Gebel Akhdar (some 500 metres above sea-level), which it reaches in the vicinity of Messa. From Messa eastwards the road can be traced without difficulty, in the form of a shallow cutting in the rock (probably of Greek origin), to Zavia Beda where the remains of the Roman town of Balagrae are still visible. On the Peutinger Map Balagrae is marked as 12 Roman miles from Cyrene, and this figure is accurate if one follows the course of the old road from Beda to the south gate of Cyrene. For its last three kilometres before reaching Cyrene, the ancient road is very clearly visible as a sunk track cut in the rock, with numerous wheel-ruts, and with ancient tombs flanking it. It is far from straight and makes several sharp bends, but there is no indication that Roman engineers attempted to eliminate these eccentricities when the road became one of the highways of the Empire.Roman milestones previously found in the area of Cyrene have all come from the Cyrene—Apollonia road, and the Trajanic column which marked the first mile on that route was found in 1915 by Italian military engineers in the course of bringing back into use the long-abandoned Roman road, which descends the upper escarpment of the Gebel. The column is now in the Museum at Cyrene, but its exact original site can be identified from photographs taken at the time of its discovery: it stood a little east of the large circular tomb immediately below the gallery which now houses the greater part of the ancient sculpture from the Italian excavations.

On some Romano-British Place-Names

For over fifty years the standard source for the form and meaning of ancient Celtic names has been Holder's Altceltischer Sprachschatz. As usual with such encyclopaedic works, the result has been to endow it in the eyes of non-specialists with an authority sometimes greater than it deserves, fine piece of scholarship though it was in its day; for there is a good deal in Holder which Celticists now know to be mistaken. He made much use of the opinions of Stokes, Rhys, and Arbois de Jubainville; and these are by now often out of date. It is important that historians should realize this. The study of British place-names has made remarkable progress of late years, but the Celtic side of it has not kept pace with the rest; for place-name scholars very rarely have any first-hand knowledge of Celtic historical grammar. Hence even in the best recent works on our place-names the Celtic etymologies are sometimes unsound, because the authors put too much reliance in obsolete or untrustworthy authorities. The present article is a short list of addenda and corrigenda to Holder and other such works, in respect of a few Romano-British names whose Celtic etymologies seem particularly to need revision. The forms taken as the starting points are those given in the Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain; or, failing that, in Holder. References to Ptolemy are from C. Müller's edition, Paris, 1883; to the Antonine Itinerary from Otto Cuntz's, Leipzig, 1929 (also to K. Miller, Itineraria Romana, Stuttgart, 1916); to the Peutinger map from Miller's edition ibid.; to the Notitia Dignitatum from O. Seeck's, Berlin, 1876; and to Ravennas from J. Schnetz's, Leipzig, 1930.