How Did the Romans Map Their Empire?
And why didn’t their maps look like ours?
If I asked you to imagine the Roman Empire, you’d probably envision something like this:
It’s an image that hangs in countless history classrooms (or occupies a slide in teachers’ PowerPoints, at least). The Roman Empire, for some reason always salmon-colored, clearly delineated on a map. The boundaries of the empire look so precise; we see Roman territory and non-Roman territory, a neat geographical binary.
But where does this map come from?
You might think that, as conquerors of the Mediterranean world, the Romans would have recorded their conquests on maps like the one we see above. But you’d be wrong.
The oldest maps of the Roman Empire, showing a distinction between Roman and non-Roman territory, date to the Renaissance. They’re reconstructions of the empire by mapmakers like Abraham Ortellius, who made this map in 1606:
Though, as you’ll see, the Romans did have some maps, they don’t seem to have used them in the same way that we do, which means that the Romans may not have envisioned their empire in the way that…
