Tabula Peutingeriana

The Tabula Peutingeriana (Peutinger table, Peutinger Map) is an illustrated itinerarium (in effect, a road map) showing the cursus publicus, the road network in the Roman Empire. The original map (of which this is a unique copy) was last revised in the fourth or early fifth century. It covers Europe, North Africa and parts of Asia (the Middle East, Persia, India). The map is named after Konrad Peutinger, a German 15–16th-century humanist and antiquarian.

The tabula is thought to date from the fifth century It shows the city of Constantinople, founded in 328, yet it still shows Pompeii, not rebuilt after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79. The prominence of Ravenna, seat of the Western Empire from 402, suggested a fifth-century revision to Levi and Levi. Certain cities of Germania Inferior that were destroyed in the mid-fifth century provide a terminus ante quem. It is thought to be the distant descendant of the one prepared under the direction of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a friend of Augustus. After Agrippa's death, the map was engraved on marble and placed in the Porticus Vipsaniae, not far from the Ara Pacis. That early imperial dating for the archetype of the map is also supported by Glen Bowersock, based on numerous details of the Roman Arabia province that look entirely anachronistic for a 4th-century map. Therefore, he also points to the map of Vipsanius Agrippa.

The map was discovered in a library in Worms by Conrad Celtes, who was unable to publish his find before his death and bequeathed the map in 1508 to Peutinger. It is conserved at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Hofburg, Vienna.