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Why Does the Peutinger Map Look So Strange? - Navigating the Roman Empire by Road | Sleepy Facts About History
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The Peutinger Map stretches nearly seven meters of parchment into a ribbon of empire, with Italy pressed flat and the Mediterranean squeezed into a narrow blue thread. To modern eyes, this medieval copy of a late Roman original looks comically distorted, as if drawn by someone who had never seen the world from above. Yet this strange shape was not a mistake. It was a deliberate design choice built to answer the practical questions of a traveler moving across eighty thousand kilometers of…
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