Previously: Books About the Tabula Peutingeriana.

There are a lot of Tube map-inspired maps of non-Tube map things out there, and not all of them are worth mentioning. This one, however, is: Sasha Trubetskoy’s map of the major roads of the Roman Empire in the year 125, done up like a subway diagram, colour-coded by name (both real, where available, and “creatively invented,” where not) and with all text in Latin.

A thing from 2015 that I hadn’t seen until recently: Londonist’s Tube Map of Roman London. “Stations indicate sites of major Roman landmarks, such as gates in the wall, municipal buildings and temples. Nobody knows what the Romans called their creations, so we’ve used the modern names, like Ludgate and Bishopsgate, which are medieval in origin. Stations in bold indicate locations where Roman remains are still accessible to the public.” [Londonist]

Other books seeing publication this month: Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps by Stephen J. Hornsby (University of Chicago Press), a history of the pictorial map art form during the 20th century [Amazon]; and Zero Degrees: Geographies of the Prime Meridian by Charles W. J. Withers (Harvard University Press), a history of prime meridians and the standardization thereof [Amazon].

An update: Mapping the Holy Land (I. B. Tauris) which I originally understood to be coming out in January, is now slated for publication this week. [Amazon]

Related: Map Books of 2017.

Previously: Antiquity à la Carte.

I’ve blogged about the Tabula Peutingeriana before. It was a medieval copy of a fourth- or fifth-century map of the Roman road network. Combined, its 11 sheets form a scroll 6.82 metres long and only 34 centimetres wide, with territories elongated beyond modern recognition; it was basically the classical period’s equivalent of a TripTik or Beck network map. The sole remaining copy is held by the National Library of Austria: it’s too fragile to put on display, though an exception was made for a single day in 2007.

Anyway. During my online meanderings today I stumbled across two academic books about the Tabula that I was previously unaware of: The Medieval Peutinger Map: Imperial Roman Revival in a German Empire by Emily Albu (2014) and Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered by Richard J. A. Talbert (2010). Both from Cambridge University Press, neither cheap.

Buy The Medieval Peutinger Map at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Buy Rome’s World at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)

The Ancient World Mapping Center—formerly the Classical Atlas Project, the team behind the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, the expensive atlas later reborn as an iPad app (iTunes link)—has a web-based map interface to classical/late antiquity geographic data. The original (2012) version of “Antiquity à la Carte” is kind of old school and clunky; the (2014) beta version shows a bit more promise. [via]

The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World was a landmark in historical cartography: an atlas that pinpointed locations from classical antiquity on modern maps. The result of more than a decade’s work and $4.5 million in funding support (here’s the project website), the print version of the Barrington Atlas, which came out in 2000, was both enormous and expensive: larger than either the National Geographic or Times Comprehensive atlases,¹ and priced at an eye-popping $395.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, there’s an iPad version of the Barrington Atlas, which (they say) contains the full content of the $395 print atlas and costs only $20 (iTunes link). On that basis it’s a no-brainer: $20 is better than $395. (95 percent off!) Classicists with iPads who don’t buy this app have something wrong with them. But how does it work as a map app?

How do you create an iPad version of an existing print atlas? If you’re the National Geographic Society, with a century or more of cartography behind it, you’re more than able to put out a $2 app that includes several levels of map detail and can be panned and zoomed to your heart’s content. But if you’re the Barrington Atlas, you don’t have the same resources.

So what you end up with in the Barrington Atlas app are high-resolution versions of the original maps from the print version. These maps—which are marvellous, by the way—used the Lambert conformal conic projection: stitching them together to form a seamless single map would be a major effort, all the more considering that the maps were produced in the 1990s using Illustrator 6 on early PowerPC Macintoshes (the iPads on which this app runs are much more powerful computers). Instead, you browse the individual maps in a Cover Flow-style interface.

That’s not to say that the app is completely uninteractive. Pressing the compass button shows you the adjacent maps, so you can explore after a fashion.

Pressing the key button opens up the legend.

Navigation is also facilitated by the Locator tab, which allows you to select individual maps from the key map interface, below. (This also shows the Barrington Atlas‘s coverage: I bet you weren’t expecting it to include Tibet.)

All things considered, it’s a reasonable approach to presenting the information without having to start from scratch, particularly for an app that will not have a broad audience.

That said, I did find a few interface problems: page-turning was slow and sometimes unreliable (tapping worked better than dragging), and the Cover Flow browsing was a bit blocky. It crashed on me once or twice. I tested this app on a new iPad Air; I wonder how well it runs on an iPad 2, which is the minimum hardware required. And the app doesn’t save state: it doesn’t remember what page of the Introduction you were reading or what map you were consulting; reopening the app starts from scratch.

Not that these are deal-breakers—not for this kind of app. It works well enough, at least on top-of-the-line hardware, that those with an interest in this subject should be able to lay down their $20 without much hesitation. It beats $395, after all.

In 102 interactive color maps, this app re-creates the entire world of the Greeks and Romans from the British Isles to the Indian subcontinent and deep into North Africa. Unrivaled for range, clarity, and detail, these custom-designed maps return the modern landscape to its ancient appearance, marking ancient names and features in accordance with modern scholarship and archaeological discoveries. Geographically, the maps span the territory of more than seventy-five modern countries. Chronologically, they extend from archaic Greece to the Late Roman Empire.

It’ll be available on November 21: plenty of time for me to get a new iPad Air by then (it works on all iPads except the original).

Previously: Barrington Atlas.