The roll is 6.75 meters long and about 33 centimeters high. Rome is drawn as a seated figure with a globe. The roads run in red and the seas are green.

It sits in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. The parchment is medieval. The map it copies is lost.

The traditional view

The Austrian National Library holds the roll as Codex 324. UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World register in 2007. It says the map was written on parchment "at the end of the 12th century."

Michael Rathmann writes that paleography places the present roll "in the years around AD 1200." He counts about 4,000 place names on it and says only 555 have a vignette. The map runs from southern Britain to India and the Ganges. Jona Lendering of Livius.org adds that Sri Lanka appears and that "Even China is mentioned."

The roll takes its name from Konrad Peutinger of Augsburg, who received it in 1507 according to Rathmann. Prince Eugene of Savoy bought it in the early eighteenth century and it entered the imperial library in Vienna in 1738.

UNESCO states the map's purpose plainly. The aim "was not the depiction of the regions concerned as a geographical map, but to show the structure and network of the cursus publicus." UNESCO calls the cursus publicus "the public transport system in use in the Roman Empire."

O. A. W. Dilke, writing in the University of Chicago's History of Cartography, calls it "primarily drawn to show main roads." He also says it "is not a military map, though it could have been used for military purposes." He puts the date of the archetype "between A.D. 335 and 366."

Lendering reads the map as the last update of a much older chain. He writes that the oldest source is "probably identical to the world map that was prepared by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa." A cartographer of the fourth century added the latest layer.

What Is Not Settled

Everyone agrees on one thing. The roll in Vienna is a copy of something older. After that the agreement ends.

Scholars have placed the first version in the third century BC or in the age of Augustus. Others choose around AD 300, the years AD 335 to 366 or the reign of Charlemagne. They disagree just as widely on what the map was for.

Where the Accounts Don't Meet

Three questions stand out. Each one is a place where published specialists disagree with each other.

When was the first version drawn?

Rathmann argues for the earliest date. He writes that the map "belongs into a chorographical tradition of cartography. Its archetype dates into Hellenistic times." He bases this on the shapes of the land. The Caspian Sea is drawn as a gulf of the northern ocean and the Altars of Alexander mark the eastern limit. He says the landmasses "correspond to the state of information of the 3rd century BC."

Richard Talbert argues for a later date. The reviewer Renate Burri summarizes his view as an unrevised copy made around AD 1200 of a lost original from the era of Diocletian, about AD 300. Burri quotes Talbert saying the original was produced "for display in a ruler's public space during the Tetrarchic period." Rathmann says Talbert tried to read the map this way "with hardly convincing arguments."

Dilke chooses the years 335 to 366. Lendering says the original was drawn after the founding of Constantinople. Both of them also see older material inside it.

Emily Albu goes the other way. A reviewer in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review quotes her on the reign of Charlemagne. She says "monks at Reichenau" produced a map "in the Peutinger line of transmission, perhaps even the prototype." She dates the surviving roll to the decade or two after the Fourth Crusade. The same reviewer writes that she "rather cavalierly minimizes the likelihood of a late Roman prototype."

The span runs from about 250 BC to the reign of Charlemagne. What kind of evidence would make the specialists agree?

What was the map for?

UNESCO says it shows the cursus publicus. Rathmann disagrees with that reading directly. He writes that the roads are "an absolutely vital source for research on viae publicae" but not, he says, for research on the cursus publicus. He adds that "No antique traveler would have been able to find his/her way in this muddle of information on distances." He gives one reason. The units of measurement change from region to region and some stretches have none.

Talbert also rejects the road map reading. Burri writes that he "convincingly argues" the map could hardly serve travelers. He proposes a wall display in a palace. Burri calls that idea attractive but says it "cannot be confirmed." Albu also reads it as a display piece, according to her reviewer, who notes that the roll has pin holes.

Rathmann proposes a third purpose. He calls it a chorographical map, a drawing meant to show space, and he suggests such maps sat in the libraries of wealthy Romans. He cites a report that a senator owned a world map on parchment in the year 91.

A map with 555 place vignettes and the distances between them has a travel look. UNESCO, Talbert and Rathmann give three different answers. What was it for?

How many maps are inside this one?

Rathmann lists entries on the roll that belong to different centuries. The map names Constantinople, founded in the fourth century. It also names the towns of Stabiae and Pompeii, which Vesuvius destroyed in AD 79. He calls this "another case of entries from two different chronological phases."

He finds still more layers. The Cotii kingdom of the Alps appears and so does a province set up under Diocletian. Four Christian notes appear, including the Mount of Olives and the spot on Mount Sinai where the law was received. He concludes that the roll "contains different chronological levels in its present-day copy."

Lendering draws the same conclusion in plainer words. The map is a fourth-century update that did not know every change of the three and a half centuries since Agrippa. Rathmann adds that copyists could change the labels but not the drawn land. His example is the name Sera Maior for China, which sits at the eastern edge with no land drawn for it.

Nobody can say how many copyists stood between the first version and the roll in Vienna. Rathmann writes that "Statements as to the number of Medieval copying stages are impossible." How would anyone separate the layers?

The questions I can't put down

Some questions need more room than one article gives them. Two of them keep pulling me back.

Who copied it, and where? Rathmann writes that the humanist Konrad Celtes "probably stole" the roll from the monastery library on Reichenau Island. Lendering says only that Celtes claimed to have found it "somewhere in a library." Renate Burri reports that the paleography in Talbert's book points to one artist at work around 1200 in southern Germany or Alsace. Dilke says it was not the work of Konrad of Colmar as once thought. In the book I write that someone mapped the Atlantic coastlines with unusual accuracy before 1513, working from older source maps. I follow that question through Earthly Enigmas. The Piri Reis Map article sets out the same problem for a different chart.

What was lost at the western end? Dilke says much of Britain and Spain was already missing when the roll was copied. Rathmann thinks two or three sheets are gone and that they once held a preface. Burri reports that Talbert thinks Rome stood in the center of the original. Rathmann finds it plausible that a Latin poem conveyed by the Irish monk Duicul in 825 once opened the lost preface. The poem praises a work that sets out the whole world. You can read a free sample of the book before you decide. Burri reports that Talbert sees links between this map and the Gough Map and a Beatus map in Paris. The Gough Map and Saint-Sever Beatus articles cover those two. The articles section has more subjects in the same format.

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