The Peutinger Table, one of the few surviving examples of Roman cartography

A road map of the Roman Empire, heavily distorted to show detail, one of the few surviving examples of Roman mapping, albeit from a single medieval manuscript copy. The eight parts, two to a sheet, are designed to join in one long strip, with parts of Britain, Iberia and North Africa on the left (the final section is lost), east to India and Taprobana, marking all the Roman settlements and about 70,000 miles of road. On eastern sheet there are two notes in Latin: 'Here scorpions live' & 'Here elephants live'. The manuscript (known as the Peutinger Table' after Konrad Peutinger, the man who brought it to the world's attention in the early C16th) was drawn on a parchment scroll 34cm high by 675cm by a monk in Alsace in the 13th century. The map he was copying was probably based on the one commissioned by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa (c.64-12 BC), but updated in the 5th century AD: Pompeii is marked despite being obliterated in 79 AD, yet both Constantinople and Antioch have the prominence only given to them after the Emperor Constantine (272-337 AD). In 1598 Ortelius requested manuscript copies of Peutinger's map; these were sent to him but Ortelius' death meant that engraved versions only appeared in his Parergon atlas from 1624. Jansson used these as his source, retaining all the detail, which was fortunate as the manuscript suffered degradation in the following years and, although housed in the Vienna Natinal Library, it is not nearly as legible as it was in Ortelius' time. Two sheets are from the 1662 Latin edition of the 'Atlas Major' and two from the Hornius atlas of the ancient world c.1700, without text on the backs.