On Ancient Maps of the World vs Maps of the Ancient World (and a few cool maps of the Roman Empire)

I thought I would share a couple cool maps of the Roman Empire that might interest Bible translators, as well as some thoughts about how different our understandings of the biblical worlds are from how they would be understood by those who lived at the time. First the cool maps.

• ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World provides a model of the Roman world with interactive abilities allowing you to estimate how long it would take (and what routes one might take) to travel by land and/or sea from one part of the Roman world to another.
• The Digital Map of the Roman Empire is based on the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World and includes a very detailed map of the Roman Empire.
• You might also enjoy playing with Antiquity À-la-carte created by the Ancient World Mapping Center.
• Finally, you might enjoy some of the evidence of my own love for this sort of thing, which can be found in these sets of Google Earth Bookmarks of places mentioned (or near to places mentioned) in the New Testament that I've put together over a period of time. You if you already have Google Earth installed you can click on the kmz files on my webpage and they will open up as temporary folders in your version of Google Earth. Then you can save them if you want.

Many modern Bibles have fine sets of maps in the back. I love all of these tools. But as I share these links and my love for maps of the ancient world I'm also reminded that they provide us with a very different (very modern) understanding of the geographical contexts of these worlds. I often find myself thinking about modern kinds of knowledge that Bible translators and biblical scholars (and modern Christians in general) bring to the ancient texts without thinking very much about the fact that ancient 'readers' would not have shared such information and would have understood their own geographical contexts very differently. Of course, many ancient Israelites or Christians may have hardly ever wandered far from the village in which they were born. 

Most early ('original') readers of the New Testament would never have stepped foot in the land of Israel and would have little or no idea of where the various towns and villages were located or how close or far they were from each other. The Gospels recount events that took place in Judea, Samaria and Gallillee, and certainly many of those who heard or followed Jesus would have known about many, if not all, the places mentioned in the Gospel narratives. But the Gospels were not written for people living in those places. They were written in Greek in places like Syria or Rome, for people whose knowledge of the geography of the land of the Bible would have been similar to the knowledge most of us (those who aren't from India and haven't spent much if any time there) would have of the relationship between places like Dimapur, Jorhat, Guwahati (India) and all the towns between and around them. That's why Matthew 2:23 refers to "a town called Nazareth," Matthew 26:36 refers to "a place called Gethsemane," Matthew 27:33 refers to "a place called Golgotha," Luke 7:11 refers to "a town called Nain." That isn't how you refer to places that you think your readers are familiar with. And many of the other places that are mentioned by name the the biblical texts may or may not have been places people heard of, but without any clear understanding of exactly where they were located or how they were geographically related to other places that were also mentioned. Of course, there could be a world traveler in the midst of the congregation (in the midst of the 'readers') but even the world travelers wouldn't have as clear an understanding of the geographical location of such places as we have today. 

I'm reminded of people who have different kinds of geographical perceptions of places they travel. One person drives from a town in Massachusetts to a town in another state and knows which roads to take and that the destination is generally northwest of the starting point but may then imagine that those roads between the one place and the other connect together in a more-or-less direct way from the one place to the other. The other person may take the same roads but has a greater awareness that they start off going south to connect to another road going northwest and then the third road takes them east. 

The Wikipedia page of Early World Maps gives us an idea of how the finest geographical scholars and cartographers of the ancient world thought places were geographically related. The famous Tabula Peutingeriana, from the 4th century A.D./C.E., shows how a scholar understood the shape of the Roman Empire at that time. I've sometimes wondered if our study Bibles should include examples of such ancient maps rather than (or along with) our modern ones, just to remind us that no one in the ancient/biblical world saw the world quite like we do with our use of modern cartography, Google Earth/Maps and satelite imagery. I also wonder how often we simply overestimate how important it is to know certain kinds of geographical information in order to interpret biblical texts along the lines that they would have been understood in their ancient/original contexts. Of course, I'm making some broad statements and there are places where early readers would have been expected to know some basic information about geographical locations and relationships.

I'll be happy if this post simply gets some conversation going (and some of us thinking in some new ways) about some of these questions ....