Maps are indispensible to the modern researcher who hopes to make sense of political, economic, social, and cultural history in the ancient world. We’ve got to know where things happened in order to make better sense of why they happened. This, of course, also holds true in the case of studying religious life and cultural interactions specifically. Such issues are essential to a broader project I am involved in, along with Canadian colleagues, that hopes to explore the ways in which travel and religion intersected in antiquity (see the Travel and Religion in Antiquity seminar website).

A recent article by Kai Brodersen (U. Mannheim), an expert on issues of geographical understanding in antiquity, surveys the state of the question and notes some recent work in the area of maps and antiquity: “Mapping (in) the Ancient World,” Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004) 183-190. Included in his discussion is the immensely useful Barrington Atlas (associated with the Ancient World Mapping Center), with which I can now locate — with some degree of probability — just about every obscure town and village that I find mentioned in inscriptions from Asia Minor (Turkey)!

At the heart of Brodersen’s own work (in this article and elsewhere) is the need to distinguish clearly between mapping in the ancient world (the manner in which the ancients did or did not think about or represent geography) and mapping the ancient world (the modern task of creating useful maps of the Greek or Roman world to aide in our research). This important distinction was not always recognized in past scholarship, which tended to imagine that the Romans did have maps and that there was a notion of scale involved in such geographical representations back then. This notion that the Romans had maps approaching what we think of as maps, Brodersen stresses, is unfounded:

“We simply lack the evidence for ‘map consciousness’ in the ancient world. While some theoretical speculation may well have implied texts and images, it would be wrong to assume that such images could easily be put to practical use, and even the copious ancient writings on strategy and warfare lack all references to maps”(p. 185)

There are itineraries listing places and distances between places, and we have instances of monuments that would serve to show what place was coming next, but there were no scaled maps in the Greek or Roman world. There are also the many examples of the literary genre of the periplus, the written record of attempts to sail round certain land masses, but these are not visual representations of geographical space.

This leaves the very important question of how did the Greeks and Romans perceive space and geography and how did they know where to go? Also, what implications do these perceptions have for our understanding of cultural and religious life specifically? James Romm’s study of The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton UP, 1994) gives us some important glimpses into just such issues, for instance, including perceptions of real or imagined foreign peoples in travel writing. If you are interested in the intersection of religion and travel, also check out my introductory paper on the subject, which includes sections on travelling to honour the gods, on the dissemination of cultic practice, and on travel writing and cultural encounters in antiquity. The seminar website I mentioned earlier also includes a developing bibliography (including some of Brodersen’s works) and links to various online resources relating to travel and religion.

P.S. You may also wish to check out another interesting article (which I have yet to thoroughly read) in that same volume that looks at demographics and the movement or migration of free populations in Roman Italy: Walter Scheid, “Human Mobility in Roman Italy, I: The Free Population,” Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004):1-26.