Dura-Europos Route map

The Dura-Europos Route map - also known as stages map - is the fragment of a speciality map from Late Antiquity discovered 1923 in Dura-Europos. The map had been drawn onto the leather covering of a shield by a Roman soldier of the Cohors XX Palmyrenorum between AD 230 and AD 235. The fragment is considered the oldest map of (a part of) Europe preserved in the original.

The Belgian archaeologist Franz Cumont discovered the map fragment during excavations in Dura Europos in 1923 in the submerged “Tower of the Archers”. The map is a fragment of leather or parchment, painted in colour, which had been found among the remnants of wooden oval shields. It was identified by Cumont as the remains of the leather cover of a laminated shield with remnants of the wooden parts of the shield still attached to the back. The map had been made by a Roman soldier, probably an infantrymen or an archer of the Cohors XX Palmyrenorum stationed in Dura. This soldier drew the travel stages of his unit on the march through the Crimean on the leather cover of his shield somewhere between AD 230 and AD 235. Geographical inconsistencies may point towards the owner of the shield having commissioned somebody else with the drawing.

The preserved fragment of the map is 0,45 by 0,18 m. Cumont assumed that the map originally had had a width of 0,65 m. The depiction is divided by a semi-circular white line into two parts. This roughly drawn line represents the coastline of the western and northern coast of the Black Sea. To the left side of the coast, the open sea is represented in blue colour, with three ships on the fragment preserved. To the right of the coastline, the land is shown in reddish colour. Twelve places of the Black Sea region are named on the map, with the Latin names being used, but transcribed into Greek. To the right of each place name, distances were noted in Roman miles, comparable to the Itinerarium Antonini. The places themselves have been depicted symbolically, with the draughtsman using the same symbol - a building with a gabled roof - for all places. It is very likely that the places mentioned are stages of a march of the Cohors XX Palmyrenorum. Two blue lines under the names Ἰστρος, ποτ(αμός) and Δάνουβις ποτ(αμός) suggest rivers which were crossed during the march.

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