Tabula Peutingeriana
map of the road network in the Roman Empire
Tabula Peutingeriana (Latin for 'The Peutinger Map'), also known as Peutinger's Tabula, Peutinger tables and Peutinger Table, is an illustrated itinerarium (ancient Roman road map) showing the layout of the cursus publicus, the road network of the Roman Empire.
Published first by Konrad Peutinger in 1507, the surviving map is a parchment copy, dating from around 1200, of a Late Antique original. It covers Europe (without the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles), North Africa, and parts of Asia, including the Middle East, Persia, and the Indian subcontinent. According to one hypothesis, the existing map is based on a document of the 4th or 5th century that contained a copy of the world map originally prepared by Agrippa during the reign of the emperor Augustus (27 BC – AD 14).
However, Emily Albu has suggested that the existing map could instead be based on an original from the Carolingian period. According to Albu, the map was likely stolen by the humanist Conrad Celtes, who left it to his friend, Konrad Peutinger, who gave it to Emperor Maximilian I as part of a large-scale book stealing scheme.
Named after the 16th-century German antiquarian Konrad Peutinger, the map has been conserved at the Austrian National Library (the former Imperial Court Library) in Vienna since 1738.
Archetype
The Tabula is thought to be a distant descendant of a map prepared under the direction of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a Roman general, architect, and a confidant to the emperor Augustus; it was engraved in stone and put on display in the Porticus Vipsania in the Campus Agrippae area in Rome, close to the Ara Pacis building.
The early imperial dating for the archetype of the map is supported by American historian Glen Bowersock, based on numerous details of Roman Arabia anachronistic for a 4th-century map. Bowersock concluded that the original source is likely the map made by Vipsanius Agrippa.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Tabula Peutingeriana” is map of the road network in the Roman Empire. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Tabula, Peutingeriana and road, not as a finished interpretation.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12767. VIAF identifies the subject as 174191273. The Library of Congress control number is n83301042. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1507, 1200 and 1738.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tabula Peutingeriana” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.