Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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An article by an essayist called Colin Marshall, 'How the Ancient Romans Travelled Without Maps', caught my eye as he pondered much the same question as TME did, how people managed to find their way across vast distances, in this case the Roman Empire, without maps or at least scaled maps
The surviving maps from the ancient Roman world tend not to take great pains adhering to true geography. Yet as the Roman Empire expanded, laying roads across three continents, more and more Romans engaged in long-distance travel, and for the most part seem to have arrived at their intended destinations.
To do so, they used not maps per se but “itineraries,” which textually listed towns and cities along the way and the distance between them. By the fourth century, “all main Roman roads along with 225 stopping stations were compiled in a document called the Itinerarium Antonini, the Itinerary of Emperor Antonius Pius.” |
https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/how-ancient-romans-traveled-without-maps.html
I’d be more inclined to believe this chap if he could locate an original ‘itinerarium’ to coonfirm the existence of Roman maps aka itineraries.
The earliest extant ‘Itinerarium antonini’ is in the Bodleian (MS Bodl. 391). Its provenance is Benedictine Abbey of St Augustine, Canterbury but the author is said to be a sixth-century archbishop/scholar, Isidore of Seville (c. 560 – 636), aka Isidore the Younger or Isidore Junior because of the earlier history purportedly written by Isidore of Córdoba.
The manuscript has been dated end of the eleventh century, apart from the folio containing the Itinerarium which is
11. (fol. 136v)
Itinerarium Antonini
Added in a late 12th cent. hand. |
Details of the ownership record suggest the manuscript is 13th century, though its acquisition is 16th century, as per the extant copies of the Itinerarium.
https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_1422
At least five primary manuscripts exist from which published texts of the Itinerarium are drawn. It has been generally agreed all of them probably derive from the 'Codex Spirensis' which was copied between AD 1427 and 1551. The Codex Spirensis turns out to be a somewhat mysterious document which appeared and then disappeared
| Codex Spirensis, a codex known to have existed in the library of the Chapter of Speyer Cathedral in 1542, but which was lost before 1672 and has not been rediscovered. |
Wiki is vague about the authorship and date of the Antonine Itinerary but insistent on its historical value
Seemingly based on official documents, possibly in part from a survey carried out under Augustus, it describes the roads of the Roman Empire.[1] Owing to the scarcity of other extant records of this type, it is a valuable historical record.[2]
Almost nothing is known of its author or the conditions of its compilation. Numerous manuscripts survive, the eight oldest dating to some point between the 7th to 10th centuries after the onset of the Carolingian Renaissance.[3] Despite the title seeming to ascribe the work to the patronage of the 2nd-century Antoninus Pius, all surviving editions seem to trace to an original towards the end of the reign of Diocletian in the early 4th century.[3] The most likely imperial patron—if the work had one—would have been Caracalla.[1]”
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