Oldest Western Map?

Nov 18, 2005 Alun The Past 1 Comment Ancient History, Ancient Science, Archaeology, Italy, Mapping, Prehistoric

Thanks in abund­ance to Archae­ology in Europe for high­light­ing this story in the Tele­graph about the west­ern world’s old­est map

The Soleto Map. Photo from the Daily Tele­graph.

The map is of the heel of Italy. You can tell because of the “ΤΑΡΑΣ” on the left of the sherd, which is the label for Taras, mod­ern Taranto. The other places are in the local lan­guage, Mes­s­apian. It’s excit­ing because it dates back to around 500BC. This puts it in an era when Greek cit­ies in South­ern Italy were firmly established.

This is being taken as more evid­ence that the Mes­s­api­ans were from Illyria, a region just to the north of clas­sical Greece. The lan­guage of the Mes­s­api is very sim­ilar to Illyrian dia­lects. I’m wary of map­ping lin­guistic groups onto eth­ni­cit­ies. I speak a Ger­manic lan­guage, but I’m pretty cer­tain that doesn’t make me Ger­man. Also evid­ence from Iron Age Bri­tain shows that lan­guage can travel without neces­sar­ily hav­ing large move­ments of people.

The best page I’ve found on it so far in Eng­lish is from the AWMC who had this noted over a year ago.

What I don’t know is who wrote it. It was in Greek, so you’d guess a Greek. But could the nat­ives be using the Greek alpha­bet for their own means, just like the Greeks copied the Phoen­i­cian alpha­bet a few years earlier? If this is the case could this be a nat­ive map rather than a Greek map? There is a tend­ency to blame Pythagoras for a lot of the innov­a­tion that hap­pens in the west­ern colon­ies, while innov­a­tion in the east is the product of inter­ac­tion with the Per­sians and Baby­lo­ni­ans. Might map­ping like this be assumed by later (Greek) his­tor­i­ans to have been a Greek inven­tion because of their low opin­ion of the nat­ives of the west? I have a feel­ing this idea is wrong but it can’t just be dis­missed out of hand. I’m off to email someone who will know better.

Addi­tional: I’ve just noted, it is inter­est­ing how neatly the sym­bol for sea matches the sym­bol for Aquar­ius. Given that this is a con­cep­tual sym­bol bor­rowed by the Greeks from the East it makes it more likely (to me) to be a Greek hand that scratched this than a nat­ive. The nat­ives could have bor­rowed the Aquar­ius sym­bol along with the alpha­bet, but it’s another step to make. I sup­pose the sym­bol is also sug­gest­ive of water, but the spiki­ness makes it unlike the waves of the sea. The O in “Otan” does show the inscriber could have scratched curves if he wished.