Road map

A road map or route map is a map that primarily displays roads and transport links rather than natural geographical information. It is a type of navigational map that commonly includes political boundaries and labels, making it also a type of political map. In addition to roads and boundaries, road maps often include points of interest, such as prominent businesses or buildings, tourism sites, parks and recreational facilities, hotels and restaurants, as well as airports and train stations. A road map may also document non-automotive transit routes, although often these are found only on transit maps.

The Turin Papyrus Map is sometimes characterized as the earliest known road map. Drawn around 1160 BC, it depicts routes along dry river beds through a mining region east of Thebes in Ancient Egypt.

The Dura-Europos Route map is the oldest known map of (a part of) Europe preserved in its original form. It is a fragment of a map drawn onto a leather portion of a shield by a Roman soldier in c. 235 AD. It depicts several towns along the northwest coast of the Black Sea.

The Tabula Peutingeriana, a copy of a scroll originally dating to about 350 AD, plots the extent of the Cursus publicus, the Roman road network that ran from Europe and North Africa to West Asia. It is highly schematic, compressing the Mediterranean Sea to a sliver and orienting the Italian Peninsula to run east-west.

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