New Edition of the Tabula Peutingeriana

The Tabula Peutingeriana is a UNESCO Memory of the World treasure which is the nearest thing to a Roman road-map still in existence.  Today I have relaunched the Tabula Peutingeriana Animated Edition with some major improvements to help both scholars and the general public understand this priceless roll now kept in a Vienna vault.

The biggest improvement to my digital reproduction at piggin.net/ta.svg will be visible when you start hovering a cursor or holding a finger on the yellow boxes which mark the mutations. In many cases, the lines now move incrementally so that you can compare the before and after states.

I hope readers will begin to perceive the Tabula more sympathetically, realizing that is is damaged rather than hopelessly old and wrong. Despite its idiosyncrasies, there is a more rationality to it than meets the eye.

The animations were technically complex to build with SMIL coding, but I decided the effort was worth it, because it can sometimes be quite difficult to spot the differences when simply flipping between two static views. On a slow computer you may find it takes a while for each of the animations to kick off, so it is prudent to hover in and out a couple of times to make sure you have seen all the steps. In Microsoft's Edge and Explorer browsers they do not seem to work at all. Use another browser.

The second big improvement here is the addition of a new database of annotations to the 62 emendations so far. I have launched this in the form of a blog, Restoring the Tabula Peutingeriana, to make it as easy as possible for readers to comment directly on every note. There has never been any central forum for these issues and I would be very glad if scholars would come here if they need, on the fly, to discuss the cases.

Other improvements include an extension of the chart's colored and emended area to Asia Minor as far as Samsat and a new link policy whereby all my charts will have very short, easily noted URLs such as piggin.net/ta.svg to make it easier to cite them. ta stands for Tabula Animated.

Exposing the Peutinger Diagram

I recently announced a project to study how the late antique Peutinger Diagram was made. This reverse engineering project is comparable to lifting the hood/bonnet of a sleek car in the hope of understanding the mechanical principles by which it was built and operates.

The first step is to create a digital version of the Peutinger Diagram on which we can overlayer the findings as we accumulate them. My starting point is the digital projection of the Diagram created by Professor Richard J. A. Talbert’s team for the 2010 book Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered (Map A).

This projection is a panorama photograph after images of the 12th-century parchment pieces of the sole surviving copy had been stitched together digitally and slightly skewed so that everything matches up.

The result was a banana-shaped image that is not very practicable in full-screen view, so I have straightened the Talbert projection, inserting a single hinge about one third of the way from the left. The left and right tips of the panorama were raised a total of 2.85 degrees with respect to one another.
The pivot point is located at Cesena, Italy and roads and rivers in the vicinity have been adjusted accordingly but the slight shifts are in no way egregious, being well below the diagram's threshold of geographical accuracy.

The second step was to create a scalable vector graphic (SVG) file based on this projection. I began by merging a selection of SVG files which are stored online at the Ancient World Mapping Center in and employed in the Talbert Map Viewer and pivoted these in the same way. I soon found however that they are not very satisfactory from a SVG-design point of view, being full of transforms, unsuitable data objects, data cruft, broken lines and many tracing errors.

I have almost entirely retraced by hand the photographic image with a great many simplifications. This adaptation will provide us a compact, interactive, fast-loading data-file similar to that I have published for the Great Stemma. I have retained the Talbert colour coding system and some of his data objects. Acknowledgement to the Talbert team's work will appear on the new file.

The third step is to match this new data view of the Tabula with the past scholarship, whereby Konrad Miller's 1916 book, Itineraria Romana, is the great monument. Miller, a German citizen-scholar who died in 1933, analysed the diagram into its key routes, effectively recasting its data into list form. What I am now doing is mapping Miller's routes as an over-layer onto the SVG file.

The results will be uploaded as I go to the project page on ResearchGate. Keep visiting the project page to see the progress. Collaborators and followers are very welcome.

12 Greatest TextArch News Stories

I posted last week on the fuss over The Gospel of Jesus's Wife, where the new evidence overwhelmingly indicates this tiny papyrus at Harvard University is a forgery.

That prompted me to look for a list of great news stories in the past few years about the archaeology of text, that is to say, recognizing by intelligent reading that a found historical text or diagram attaches to a noted author or a previously unsuspected context. There isn't any list I can find that spans ancient, medieval and modern, so I have compiled one for your reading pleasure.

In this 21st-century tally of great recent #TextArch news stories in date order: the years are of the media attention, not of the discoveries:

1. Troyes ms. 1452 contains 113 anonymous love letters attributable to Héloïse and Abelard (2000 book reviews)
   
2. BAV Vat. sir. 623 contains an unknown comedy by Menander palimpsested with Dyscolus (Harlfinger 2003; Pearse 2011)
3. Artemidorus Papyrus (below) contains only known ancient Greek topographical map (2006 exhibition)
   
4. Archimedes Palimpsest found to contain lost Stomachion and The Method of Mechanical Theorems by Archimedes, Against Timandra and Against Diondas by Hyperides (2007 book)
5. Vlatadon 14 found to contain Galen's lost On Consolation from Grief (2010 Libé; Pearse)
6. Munich BSB cod. graec. 314 found to contain lost Homilies on Psalms of Origen (2012; edition)
7. Papyrus lent to Harvard claimed to contain an unknown Gospel of Jesus's Wife (2012; discredited 2016)
8. Copiale Cipher (book in private ownership?) decoded and linked to German Oculists (2012)
9. Cod. Hierosolymitanus Sancti Sepulcri 36 found to contain a lost text of Euripides (2013)
10. Green Collection cartonnage said to contain portions of two poems by Sappho (2014)
11. Sulaymaniyah Museum Tablet T.1447 revealed to contain 20 lost lines of Gilgamesh (2015)
    
12. Paris BNF NAL 3245 (below) identified as a lost Vita of Francis of Assisi by Thomas de Celano (2015)
    

And next year? Maybe the publication of my book disclosing that an unsuspected Roman-era chart of genealogies and timelines has been reconstructed from segments in medieval manuscripts and turns out to be the world's oldest information visualization. Let me know now (by comments or by Twitter) if this is a book you would want to read or spread word about!

The criteria for my list above (and these all concern the identification of a text or a diagram, not the finding of the support on which the text is written) are:

• the text or diagram lacks any author's name or date;
• scientifically tenable grounds are advanced for the attribution;
• the work is famed: either lost or altering our knowledge of the past;
• stories of it had to crop up over several days in major news media.

I suspect these bunch in years because we in the media tend to re-enact memes, then grow weary of them. A recent article in The Guardian, John Dugdale lists celebrated refindings of 20th-century works in a sudden 2015 rush, which I think tends to support my explanation. I nearly included two great media feasts of 2006:

1. Linking of the anonymous Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things to Percy Bysshe Shelley, but that was essentially about finding the sole surviving printed copy
2. Launch of Antikythera Mechanism project, culminating in this year's Almagest 7/1 edition, but that is essentially an artefact story.

There's also a list at Oxford including some more obscure Graeco-Roman rediscoveries.

And what would you add to my list?

Top TextArch Story of 2016

The general news media only pick up on text-archaeology stories once a year at most. The big story of 2012 was the emergence of a piece of papyrus containing what was supposedly a gnostic gospel with a saying by Jesus referring to "my wife." It looks like the huger story of 2016 will be the emergence of damning doubts about the provenance of that snippet.

Late on June 15, The Atlantic published an investigative story by Ariel Sabar linking the papyrus to Walter Fritz, a German man now living in Florida who has studied egyptology. Take the time to read this story, as it is likely to go down in history as one of the great pieces of text-archaeology journalism.

Christian Askeland writes in a comment on the usually authoritative Evangelical Text Criticism blog that Sabar was not in fact the first to identify Fritz as principal in the matter or flag his knowledge of Coptic, but adds in praise, "Sabar’s work is clearly original. The large majority of his presentation is material uniquely discovered by him."

A Google New search indicates French and Dutch media have reported this now, but the retail German news media have yet to pick up on this amazing back story, which has yet another back story behind it: the employment of Mr Fritz as director of the Stasi Museum in Berlin when he was 27 years old in 1991-92. The German freelance journalist involved, Petra Krischok, does not mention the story on her website.

What's also very striking to me as a journalist is how hugely difficult under restrictive German laws it would have been to expose this story if it had happened in Germany: the Fritz trail through company incorporations, land ownership and so on would have been unsearchable. All of this public registry data is treated as confidential under Germany's ridiculous Datenschutz laws. The new EU "right to be forgotten" law makes it even harder to track what someone did in 1991.

As a law grad I would also be interested to hear discussion of whether any of the alleged actions during the production of this papyrus to Professor Karen King of Harvard could possibly constitute a crime.

And as an observer of life, I am struck by the psychological issues here. Sabar suggests that King, so academically gifted, is perhaps a poor judge of real life. Watch Sabar on the video which is entitled "To Catch a Forger" (did The Atlantic's lawyer really okay that?) and you'll see that he is very much the writer, a bit shy. Read the quotes from Fritz and you are struck by the great emotional intelligence of such a person, able to yield slivers of truth in a patient bid to convince someone of falsity. The next step I guess is for one of the great tiger interviewers of the business to get Fritz into a TV studio.