Introduction
In the grave of a military officer, buried around 239 BCE, seven maps drawn in ink on thin pieces of wood were deposited; they represent a small region at a scale of c. 1:300.000 (Yee 1994: 37). Similarly, the grave of a ruler of 168 BCE preserved a map of a larger region, drawn to a scale of c. 1:180.000 and marking plains, mountains, rivers, roads, and places with standardized symbols and names, and another map with a detail of the same region, at a scale c. 1:100.000, marking forts and lines of defense (Bulling 1978; Hsu 1978, 1984). During their lifetimes, the officer and the ruler had both apparently had access to scale maps that were so important to them that they were buried together with their bodies. Literary evidence from the same period also refers to the use of maps. So a historical work from the second/first century BCE relates that in 227 BCE, the son of a ruler ordered a hit man to kill a neighboring dynast. To get close to the victim, the killer pretended...
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Brodersen, K. (2020). Maps, Cartography, and Worldview in the Roman World. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0_1460
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