Peutinger Map

Tabula Peutingeriana (Latin for "The Peutinger Map"), also referred to as Peutinger's Tabula or Peutinger Table, is an illustrated itinerarium (an ancient Roman road map) showing the layout of cursus publicus, the road network in the Roman Empire.

The map is a 13th-century parchment copy of the Roman original, and covers Europe (without the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles), North Africa, and parts of Asia (including the Middle East, Persia, and India). The original map which the surviving copy is based on is thought to date to the 4th or 5th century and was itself based on a map prepared by Agrippa during the reign of the emperor Augustus (27 BC – AD 14).

Named after the 16th-century German antiquarian Konrad Peutinger, the map is today kept at the Austrian National Library in Vienna.

The Tabula is thought to be a distant descendant of the map prepared under the direction of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a Roman general and architect, and friend and ally of emperor Augustus whose rule coincided with the beginning of the first millenium. After Agrippa's death in 12 BC, that map was engraved in marble and put on display in the Porticus Vipsania in the Campus Agrippae area in Rome, close to the Ara Pacis building.

The early imperial dating for the archetype of the map is supported by American historian Glen Bowersock, and is based on numerous details of Roman Arabia that look entirely anachronistic for a 4th-century map. Bowersock concluded that the original source is likely the map made by Vipsanius Agrippa. This dating is also consistent with the map's inclusion of the Roman town of Pompeii near modern-day Naples, which was never rebuilt after it had been destroyed in an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

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