How to Navigate the Roman Empire

The Tabula Peutingeriana is one of the most remarkable surviving maps from the ancient world. Held at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, it is a medieval copy of a Roman road map, originally drawn on a parchment scroll almost seven metres long and just 34 centimetres high.The map depicts the road network of the Roman Empire, stretching from the British Isles and the Atlantic coast to the Middle East and India. Thousands of place names, roads and distances are recorded along its routes.Unlike a modern geographical map, the Tabula Peutingeriana makes little attempt to represent the world to scale. Its extraordinary elongated shape, with the Mediterranean compressed into a narrow strip, reflects its real purpose: showing the connections between settlements and the routes linking them. Distances between places are marked in Roman miles, making it an important record of how people could travel across the Roman world.You can explore this extraordinary document on the Tabula…