Some more Roman mapmaking.

In the early 200s CE, the emperor Septimius Severus commissioned a massive (60 feet by 45 feet!) marble plan of the city of Rome. Though it was not to scale, it showed the location and floor plan — down to the placement of individual columns — of every major building in central Rome. Sadly, like a lot of Roman marble structures, the map was torn apart by medieval people scavenging for building materials. We only have a few fragments, which give us a tantalizing glimpse of what must have been a stunning display:

Another fascinating “map” fragment from the 200s CE comes from a soldier’s shield, discovered in Syria in the 1920s:

It’s really hard to see, but etched into the leather of this soldier’s equipment is the route he must have taken during his military service from Byzantium north along the coast of the Black Sea:

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The most common geographical evidence we have from ancient Rome are catalogs of places. Roman maps, to the extent that they existed at all, were almost certainly rare and expensive. Ordinary Romans would not have had access to them. Instead, Romans would have used itineraria, which are just what they sound like — lists of the places a traveler might encounter along a certain road. Many itineraria are catalogs of the milestones that the Roman government placed on its road network.

One of the more famous itineraries is found on a set of cups that were excavated in Vicarello; they describe the route from Cadiz, Spain to Rome.

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Ptolemy was the most famous geographer of Roman times, writing a book that we now generally refer to as the Geography. It is, in many ways, a guide to making maps. Most of the work is a sort of database of some 8,000 locations and their coordinates.

But Ptolemy also includes detailed instructions for mapmaking. In the Geography, Ptolemy discusses which map projections are most accurate and how to orient maps. But we don’t have any evidence that Ptolemy himself made maps, and no ancient maps survive that are based on Ptolemy’s instructions (this is not surprising – we don’t have many text that survive straight from ancient times). The earliest extant maps based on Ptolemy’s ideas date to the medieval period, like this one from the 1400s.

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This week, a series on the way that the Romans mapped (or didn’t) their empire.

If I asked you to imagine the Roman Empire, you’d probably envision something like this:

But the oldest maps of the Roman Empire that show the empire this way date from the Renaissance, like this one by Abraham Ortellius, who made this map in 1606:

This isn’t because Romans didn’t understand geography. They knew the world was round, for example. In fact, the Romans sometimes used the image of the globe to express their worldly power. Here’s a coin from Constantine’s time, showing the god Sol Invictus holding the globe in his hand. The point isn’t exactly subtle.

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The art of the Indo-Greek world is full of gods, stories, themes, and styles that shave traveled pretty far from their origins. Greek stories showed up in Indian art, as in this Dionysian scene of revelry that was discovered in Gandhara (in modern day Afghanistan and northern Pakistan):

Or this Indo-Greek depiction of the Trojan Horse:

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Coins weren’t the only, or the most important, place that Indian and Greek cultures impacted one another. Take a look at this 1885 photo of a piece of an ancient column found in what’s now northern Pakistan:

If you know your Greek columns, you’ll be able to identify this as the Corinthian style (Corinthian capitals are the really complicated ones with lots of leaves). But who’s that in the middle?

Yep, it’s the Buddha, plunked down in the middle of a very Greek-looking piece of sculpture.

And look what’s on top of it — a bunch of very distinctively stylized Indian elephants:

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Check out this stunner of a coin from the Indo-Greek king Antialkidas. On the front, we have the man himself, accompanied by the text “VICTORIOUS KING ANTALKIDAS.” On the back, he depicts the Greek gods Zeus and Nike along with an Indian elephant, accompanied by the same text in the Karoshti script.

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Let’s take a look at Indo-Greek art and culture this week. Indo-Greek culture emerged after Alexander the Great’s armies pushed to the edge of India. Even though Alexander’s armies retreated, he left behind a lot of Greek culture and Greek people. The two cultures combined in all sorts of interesting ways.

Here are some coins of Agathokles the Just, a Bactrian king who ruled in the 180s BCE. We don’t know a whole lot about him, but he left behind a lot of coins that give us a sense of what must have been happening in this part of the world.

This shows Herakles wearing a lion skin on his head, with the words “ALEXANDER SON OF PHILIP;” on the back of the coin, Zeus holds an eagle, accompanied by the words “KING AGATHOKLES THE JUST.”

Pretty Greek, right?

It’s square, a shape much more common in Indian coins. And you’ll notice that it has two different scripts, one on the front and one on the back. On the one side, we see the Hindu deity Balarama-Samkarshana with the words (in Greek) “KING AGATHOKLES,” while on the back we have a Hindu god, Vāsudeva-Krishna, with Agathokles’ name written in the Brahmi script, which was widely used in South Asia.

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Much of the art in the medieval Buddhist temple-caves at Dunhuang was meant to inspire monks in their meditation. This is the art that is truly spectacular. It’s meant to be mind-blowing, to obliterate monks’ egos and help them to attain nirvana — literally, the blowing out of the flame of desire.

Artists created swirling, complex tableaux of people, animals, and supernatural figures. This was known as the “thousand-Buddha” style – every square inch of the caves was covered with religious art.

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Donor portraits show the array of cultures and ethnicities that came together in Dunhuang, China, a center of Buddhist worship and a center of Silk Road trade. Here are some female donors from the Buddhist kingdom of Khotan, a melting pot of Indian, Persian, and Chinese cultures, which sat to China’s west for centuries.

Here’s the sun-averse king of the Uighur people, who also lived to the west of Dunhuang:

Since some of the pigments the Dunhuang artists used have held up better than others, it’s hard to tell what the original coloring was on the paintings. Sometimes, this creates a ghostly effect, as in this portrait of a Khotanese princess and her companion, who have been rendered faceless by time:

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