Archaeologists find western world\'s oldest map

[L. Aufidius Pantera]

they are not, by any chance, related to my good friend Mr. Daeneken, by any chance?? :lol:

[Praefectusclassis]

How about a fair number of tombstones from Legio I, X and XXX in Nijmegen? Died on a campaign? Prft. Oh well, I think I know what group you're talking about Robert. Makes me think of a certain visitor we had on RAT not two months ago...

[Praefectusclassis]

Still doesn't explain why they didn't choose Brundisium, which really makes me curious, cause there is so much evidence it was thé most important port militarily in the 1st C BC.

[Robert Vermaat]

they are not, by any chance, related to my good friend Mr. Daeneken, by any chance?? :lol:

:lol: No, no gods in chariots!! :lol:

nah, actually they make great studies of early medieval sources, just coming to awful conclusions..\\
Did you know that the Scheldt river was actually once called the Rhenus? And that all Roman history on the Rhine was actually situated in Belgium?*







* no of course it wasn't!!!!!

[Praefectusclassis]

* no of course it wasn't!!!!!

Thanks for that Robert, I almost took that for real on the basis of your status as eminent Roman historian. :lol:

Okay, let's stop hijacking this thread, it's quite interesting as it is. :wink:

[tlclark]

Christoph:

Travis - thats what I thought was what your were trying to say. And I don't think it sounds absurd. As regards the stone to stone approach to establishing the frontiers, and the engineering "cheats", I am not quite sure I buy it just yet. More convincing needed, I'm afraid

I know exactly how you feel. In art History the Pantheon is held up as this masterpiece of Roman Engineering and then some guy tells me its geometry is all off, and that they just fudged a lot of details. Kinda disconcerting, but he has the proof which comes in the form of lots of mechanical details, measurements and proportions which show that they are using estimates, guesses and practical standards far more than you would guess.

Roy Lewis is the guys' name and the dissertation is not yet published, (It's been more than a year since I talked to him) but I'll check, It should be under U Penn's catalogue if it's finished. But I'm convinced.

About fort location and organization I wouldn't hazard a guess since that's totally not my thing, but on the buildings and road and engineering, it seems true.

Travis

[andym]

LOL the map show that both Brancaster(Branodunum) ,Caister and Caister St Edmund in Norolk UK are under water!Not to mention Burgh Castle near Great Yarmouth!I bet they beleive that there is no such thing as Natural Selection! :o o o

[L. Aufidius Pantera]

The Pantheon issue is not by any chance the whole issue of the columns not fitting the proportions of the architrave and the rest of the front? I thought the reason for that was usually assumed to have been a shipload of columns getting broken/lost and replaced by the nearest possible example... - there's quite a bit of good work on it by Claridge (though I haven't got the references at hand, will try and get them). But the things that really gets me (re Pantheon) that I don't think the dome could have been "fluffed"... or think of e.g. the Carthage aqueduct near Bulla Regia (or any other aqueduct for that matter) - up to 40m high, and a regular falling gradient of a couple of tens of centimeters per kilometre length. Surely you must have advanced engineering for that?

But I think we're veering off... would love to get the thesis ref is possible so I can try and be convinced (I may appear narrow minded, but am actually open to new ideas, believe it or not ) Back to maps it is...

My basic issue was not so much the engineering issue, but that I still (sorry ) cannot see how you do large scale centralized topographic planning (as outlined above) without some form of realistic representation of geography...

Sorry to keep going on,
C.

[L. Aufidius Pantera]

Jasper,

not sure why not Brundisium? Proximity to Dalmatia and Pirate issues? From looking at harbours it does seem to me that Ravenna gets to be "as good as it gets" for a military harbour (apart from silting up later :lol: ) - the whole laguna thing does seem to have a lot of parallels to early Misenum, Carthage and others...

Not sure whether Brundisium has the same to offer in the long run? Or was it case of overland distance to Rome? I.e. get messages to and from Rome, for which Misenum and Ravenna are much more suited than fairly far away (and windy roaded) Brundisium...

C.

PS
What am I talking about :roll:

[floofthegoof]

Regarding the complete lack of evidence of Roman maps and scientific illustrations, I have to ask how much surviving Roman paper do we have? The very earliest manuscripts are medeival copies aren't they?

Here's a hypothetical scenario: Let's say that for some reason that all paper from before the year 1800ce was destroyed before people took an interest in history. Disregarding the example in the OP, when would we see the first evidence of maps? Maybe some woodcut would survive from the 1700s, but maybe not. We would wonder about how the Portugese could imagine a way to sail to India with such a long, circuitous route around Africa.

Maps are changing things aren't they? Why would a medieval scribe want to reproduce an outdated map? How likely is it, that maps were in fact in widespread use, but the evidence is just gone? Polybius knew that the sun got higher in the sky as you went south, and he also knew if you went far enough, the sun would switch sides and go down the the opposite horizon. How did he know that? I was surprised to read that in Polybius.

Just how important is Paper in our search? Maybe very important?

[tlclark]

I don't know about the columns, I'll have to dig up his e-mail and ask him. I just did the search on Franklin, the UPenn website and it isn't there.

Yeah, maybe we should start a new thread, but his stuff is just amazing. Now I don't want to give the impression that they were just winging it with no forethought, there's no doubt they were serious builders and professionals, but he showed me a lot of calculations that show the Romans are deliberately avoiding what he called "big math". They chose dimensions and methods that made their calculations easier and relied on a lot of just practical experience, and tight construction discipline to make things work.

up to 40m high, and a regular falling gradient of a couple of tens of centimeters per kilometre length. Surely you must have advanced engineering for that?

Yeah, that's what you would think, but for example, to make a wall straight, you can either use a lot math and surveying, or you can put the first brick down straight and then maintain a lot of discipline in your bricklayers, and every once a while check to make sure your lines are straight.

BTW - That's more or less the way they built the great cathedrals of europe, and that's some serious engineering

But I think we're veering off... would love to get the thesis ref is possible so I can try and be convinced (I may appear narrow minded, but am actually open to new ideas, believe it or not ) Back to maps it is...

My basic issue was not so much the engineering issue, but that I still (sorry ) cannot see how you do large scale centralized topographic planning (as outlined above) without some form of realistic representation of geography...

Well looking back at my brick analogy, you can think of it this way. You have one guy that's the vision guy, he gives the command and then his commanders receive lots of local updates from the field. The guy at the top only needs to know the big issues, all the rest never percolates up. If the locals know their job and are extremely disciplined it should work fine with only a rough outline. Just lay the first brick straight and let the bricklayers do their job, checking in from time to time. It's the same as the price system in a market economy or better yet, Mark Twain's description of river pilots. No one could know the whole route of the missisipi, it was too big, the sand bars shifted too much. The best they could do was know their 5-mile stretch. The guy running the riverboat only had to know his pilots, not the river, however, to be a successful riverboat entrepeneur.

In the same way a commander only had to know his locals and local leaders, not the whole picture. If you've got men in a fort on the frontier, all you have to do is know them, not the local terrain. Knowing the local terrain is the local leaders job. If he screws up and doesn't know it, you replace him with someone who does. There is no over-arching global understanding of the topography, only a system of managing local knowledge.

In fact, if that's true, and here I'm just speculating wildly, maybe this was a big problem for the Romans, cuz when the forts start disappearing in the late period, through atrophy or conquest, maybe they lost a lot of their so-called operational knowledge, making it harder to maintain their control.

That's REALLY an interesting idea!

Hang on, I gotta go write a footnote for the dissertation.

Travis

[tlclark]

Maps are changing things aren't they? Why would a medieval scribe want to reproduce an outdated map? How likely is it, that maps were in fact in widespread use, but the evidence is just gone?

Short answer: VERY.

That's the problem. We just don't know. The same is true for literally thousands of issues, not just maps.

Survival of artifacts is a big problem.

And like the old canard "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", we can never say for sure.

And the second they find a comprehensive copy of a global map with fairly reliable details, all of this arguing will disappear and a lot of scholars who've made their careers on this will suddenly be consigned to the ash-heap of history.

It's happened before.

Right now we can only look at circumstantial evidence, and I think it suggests that Romans did not have significant operational global maps or mapping systems.

BUT...

Tomorrow they could uncover some fabulous floor mosaic of the Mediterranean world with lots of fabulous detail and I will have to tear up that chapter of my dissertation and move on.

You make your bets and you take your chances...

Travis

[hoplite14gr]

Some one asked a map of the Greek colonies in the ancient world.
One was made in 1923 by William_R.Shepherd and published by
Velhagen_und_Klafing.
Kind regards
Stefanos

[floofthegoof]

I was reading Polybius tonight, and I found something interesting that made me remember this discussion. He is describing Sicily. I'll type in the relevant part.

Book I 42

Sicily then, as a whole occupies he same position with regard to Italy and it's extremity that the Peloponnese occupies with regard to the rest of Greece and it's extremity, the difference lying in this, that the Peloponnese is a peninsula whereas Sicily is an island, the communication being in the one case by land and the other by sea. Sicily is triangular in shape, the apices of all three angles being formed by capes.

Triangular he says! That's a very 2D concept. Definately a map in the head if not on paper. Funny, why the long winded description? Why couldn't he draw a triangle? What did they use for writing in those days? Maybe, unlike today where we use the same tools for writing and drawing, they did not? Maybe you couldn't in fact 'draw' with the tools scribes used for writing.

How did Polybius know that it was triangular?

[Dan Diffendale]

Jumping in a bit late, here... I just got back from Italy a couple of days ago. But, while I was there, I visited Taranto and saw the Soleto Map (the original topic of this thread, if you were wondering... :roll: )

The piece is indeed about the size of a postage stamp, see here.

Though described as a fragment, it's clear that it's merely a fragment of a vase, not of a larger map. That is, whoever made the map picked up an already-broken potsherd and incised it. The one name that's damaged, in the upper righthand corner, is due to wear on the edge, rather than a larger break. (See the whole thing here).

Here's a comparison of the Soleto map with a modern map on which the ancient places are placed.

Based on the alphabet used, it is securely dated between 450 and 400 BCE.

I wish I'd taken more notes!