Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderNetwork map fact

The Tabula Peutingeriana is a Roman road map drawn on a parchment strip almost seven metres long but only about 35 centimetres high. To fit, it squeezes the shape of the empire so that roads, stopping places and distances stay easy to read.

Peutinger Map

HistoryDesignMigration

The story behind the card

The surviving map is a medieval copy made around 1200 from an ancient Roman original. It shows some 555 cities and 3,500 other place names from Britain to India; the westernmost section, with Spain and most of Britain, is lost. Its roads and stations reflect the cursus publicus, the Roman state's courier and transport service, which kept roads, inns and fresh horses ready for officials. The scholar Conrad Celtes found the map in 1494 and left it to the Augsburg humanist Konrad Peutinger, whose name it bears. Since 1738 it has been kept in the Austrian National Library in Vienna, and in 2007 it was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

Türkçe oku
Tabula Peutingeriana, neredeyse yedi metre uzunluğunda ama ancak 35 santimetre kadar yüksekliğinde bir parşömen şeride çizilmiş Roma yol haritasıdır. Bu şeride sığmak için imparatorluğun biçimini sıkıştırır; böylece yollar, konak yerleri ve mesafeler kolayca okunur.

Elimizdeki harita, antik bir Roma haritasından 1200 dolaylarında çıkarılmış bir Orta Çağ kopyasıdır. Britanya'dan Hindistan'a yaklaşık 555 kent ile 3.500 başka yer adı gösterir; İspanya'yı ve Britanya'nın büyük bölümünü içeren en batıdaki parça kayıptır. Haritadaki yollar ve duraklar, Roma devletinin resmî ulak ve taşıma örgütü cursus publicus'un ağını yansıtır; bu örgüt memurlar için yolları, hanları ve taze atları hazır tutardı. Bilgin Conrad Celtes haritayı 1494'te buldu ve Augsburglu hümanist Konrad Peutinger'e bıraktı; harita adını ondan alır. 1738'den beri Viyana'daki Avusturya Ulusal Kütüphanesi'nde saklanır, 2007'de de UNESCO'nun Dünya Belleği Listesi'ne alındı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Peutinger Map
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderTrade

The Columbian Exchange is the vast transfer of plants, animals, diseases and people between the Americas and the rest of the world that followed Columbus's voyage of 1492. Potatoes, maize and tomatoes crossed the Atlantic eastwards; horses, wheat, smallpox and millions of enslaved Africans were carried west.

The historian Alfred W. Crosby gave the process its name in his 1972 book The Columbian Exchange. American crops changed diets across the Old World: potatoes helped Europe's population grow, maize became a staple in much of Africa, and chilli peppers reached India and Korea. In the other direction, horses transformed life on the North American plains, and cattle, sugar cane and wheat remade American landscapes. The heaviest cost fell on Indigenous Americans. Smallpox, measles and other diseases they had never met killed a large share of the population within decades, and the plantation economy that followed drove the forced transport of millions of enslaved Africans.

The Columbian ExchangeRead card
WonderArchaeology

The Pazyryk carpet, made some 2,300 to 2,500 years ago and preserved in a frozen tomb in Siberia's Altai Mountains, is the oldest known carpet with a knotted pile, the soft surface of a rug.

The Soviet archaeologist Sergei Rudenko found it in 1949 in barrow 5 at Pazyryk, a burial mound of the horse-riding nomads of the Altai. Robbers had broken into the tomb in ancient times; water seeped in through their tunnel and froze, and the ice kept felt, wood, textiles and the carpet intact. Rudenko dated the burials to the fifth century BC; later work places this group of barrows in the fourth to third centuries BC. The carpet is about two metres square and holds around 1.25 million knots, with borders of horsemen and deer around a central field. Scholars still argue over where it was woven, with Persia, Armenia and Central Asia all proposed. It is kept at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

Pazyryk carpetRead card
WonderArchitecture

Fujian tulou are huge round or square houses in south-east China with walls of pounded earth, built by Hakka and Minnan communities. One fortified ring could house a whole clan, sometimes several hundred people, around a shared courtyard.

Most tulou were built between the 12th and 20th centuries in the hills of south-western Fujian, where bandits and feuds between clans made a house that could be shut like a fortress worth the effort. Walls three to five storeys high were made by pounding earth between wooden boards, layer upon layer. The outside has a single gate and few windows; inside, timber galleries run round every floor. Each family had its own rooms from the ground to the top floor, while the courtyard held the well and the ancestral hall, where the clan honoured its forebears. The largest tulou could house up to 800 people. UNESCO listed 46 of them as a World Heritage Site in 2008.

Fujian tulouRead card
WonderDesign

The Anglepoise desk lamp, designed in 1932 by the British engineer George Carwardine, stays at whatever angle you set it. Springs balance the weight of its jointed arms, so the shade moves with a light touch and then holds still.

Carwardine was a car designer and consultant who specialised in vehicle suspension, so he knew how springs could hold a load steady. He worked out a balance of springs and arms that let a lamp keep its position at almost any angle, and applied for a patent in July 1932. In 1934 he licensed the design to Herbert Terry and Sons, a spring maker in Redditch, and their four-spring model 1227, released in 1935 for use at home, proved very popular. In 1937 a Norwegian company, Luxo, began making its own version. A Luxo lamp later starred in Pixar's first short film, Luxo Jr. (1986), which is why a desk lamp still hops across the studio's logo.

Anglepoise lampRead card
WonderArchitecture

Caravanserais were fortified roadside inns built along trade routes across the Middle East, Anatolia and Central Asia. Behind one strong gate, merchants found rooms, storerooms, stables and water, and because the inns stood about a day's journey apart, caravans could plan each stage.

The word comes from Persian: kârvân, a caravan, and sarây, a palace or large building. A typical caravanserai was a courtyard ringed by rooms, with animals and goods kept safely inside the walls at night. Rulers and wealthy patrons built them to encourage trade, and many were supported by charitable foundations. In Anatolia the Seljuks built a dense network in the thirteenth century; the Sultan Han on the Konya–Aksaray road, built in 1229, is one of the largest. In Iran, the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas I added many more around 1600, and in 2023 UNESCO listed 54 Persian caravanserais as World Heritage. Besides shelter, they were places to trade, exchange money and hear the news from other cities.

CaravanseraiRead card
Next card in the archiveThe Struve Geodetic Arc is a 2,820-kilometre chain of survey points running from Norway to the Black Sea. Between 1816 and 1855, surveyors used it to measure a long north-south line across the globe and work out the size and shape of the Earth.Read next →