Archaeologists find western world\'s oldest map

[Theodosius the Great]

A map of southern Italy dated to about 500 BC :

[url:3sumjksy]http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/18/wmap18.xml[/url]

[hoplite14gr]

Top left side you see GRAIA OR GRAXA the oldest Greek colony perhaps in Italy.
Most Linguists belive that HELLENES are refered as Greeks in the West from that colony.
Kind regards
Stefanos

[Ebusitanus]

What do we understand under "map"? This is certainly not something I would take along on my journeys

[L. Aufidius Pantera]

have to agree with Ebusitanus... ever since this came up I have been envisaging myself somwhere between Reggio di Calabria and Cosenza in a car with this thing on my lap....
:lol:


Not a funny thought - give me the Tabula Peutingeriana any day!!!
C.

[Praefectusclassis]

On the other hand, this map seems to have a bi-directional idea of space, unlike the Peutinger map.

[floofthegoof]

The article says that this fragment is the size of a postage stamp, so really we're just looking at a tiny close up detail of the larger map. I wonder if they'll be able to piece it together?

[L. Aufidius Pantera]

... which really strikes Jasper's point home even more and opens the issue for wider speculation:

if this is only a tiny fragment, what did the whole thing look like? does the curvy line of the "heel" of italy imply that the whole thing would indeed represent a vague shape of the mediterranean with attached and intruding bits of land? If so, how come the Romans lost this - more realistic and useful - concept of the representation of space on maps?

I'll go and ponder...
C.

[Gashford]

Jasper

For those that don't follow, how does this map differ from the Peutinger map when you talk about bi directional .. obviously I understand what you mean, I am simply asking for those out there that don't quite follow ... :oops: *ahem*

Cheers

[Praefectusclassis]

Ah. Well, for those that don't quite follow and are obviously not Graham :wink: :
The Peutinger map is really only interested in which town/village/hamlet is connected to which other one, and doesn't care about their relative distance. It ended up looking like a map, but one that's been squeezed down into a scroll of paper, about one foot high and (IIRC) about a dozen feet wide. It is more related to the so-called 'Periploi' ('sail-alongs'), descriptions of what you see when you travel around a certain sea-coast, travelling in one direction. So you get 'then after x stadia you see this mountain, followed by that river and that town, a little further xyz' No directions! So if you'd draw it out without knowing what it really looks like, you get a line with landmarks on it.
Now this map, if it is what it looks like, would show "Go NE to go from A to B", which is a whole new concept.

[L. Aufidius Pantera]

Now this map, if it is what it looks like, would show "Go NE to go from A to B", which is a whole new concept.

Ah, the man has possible answered my problem... Surely looking at the map above, and modern maps, they make more spatial sense to us. But to use them, you must have an understanding where "North" or, to use Jasper's example, NE actually is...

I guess for the Greeks in the colonies this would have been a logical concept, seeing the significant emphasis their culture had on sailing and - hence - navigation. But can we assume the same for your bog-standard little Roman? (No heresy intended)

But, if you were stuck in, say, a German or Dacian forest, did not know advanced navigation and couldn't see the sun/Polaris because of whatever, a "Good map" in our view might be quite useless. Whereas a bi-directional representation of the space around you would actually be quite useful...

Or has sitting in a cellar full of books made me go mad?

[Praefectusclassis]

Your bog-standard little Roman did develop (read: borrow/steal from the Greeks) no less than 12 main wind directions though...And on the other hand, periploi, let's say monodirectional maps, are more useful for 90% of ancient naval navigation since that's all coastal and on the Med you can see coastal landmarks almost everywhere (see Horden & Purcell, The Corrupting Sea).

[aitor iriarte]

I posted on RAT some time ago that the so-called portulan maps, from the late Middle Age, portrait very reallistically the Mediterranean and even the Atlantic Ocean coast line. Surprisingly, that exactitude stops abruptly when we reach territories not belonging to Roman Empire. It is most striking to see the detailed outline of Britain transformed into a rough squarish sketch North of Hadrian's Wall.
Portulan makers were only interested on coast lines and coast cities but they probably copied their map outlines from a Roman archetype (through who knows how many now lost intermediate steps!). Such map could only have been traced by Roman surveyors measuring land under Roman control, not from the sea...

Aitor

[Jeroen Pelgrom]

How did the Romans\\Greeks check their North during the day - with the sun or other stuff?

[hoplite14gr]

If you check www.ancientgr.com (they have pagr in english too) you will see picture of an astrolabus date 80 B.C.
Various Geographer describe sky details. there is also work in progrees linking the knowledge of the Bronze age astronomers with the classical ones
Kind regards.
Stefanos

[Tarbicus]

Must have been the Sun and the stars. The first known mention of a compass seems to be from China in 83AD; a south-pointing spoon, and jade collectors carrying a "south-pointer" with them. But the compass didn't get to Western Europe until the 12th Century it seems.
The Medieval Technology Pages

Tree trivia (unless you're lost in the woods): There will be fewer branches on the north side of a tree, some mosses only grow on the south side of a tree, and ants like to build their nests on the south side of a tree.