11-23-2005, 08:42 AM
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.
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.
