2,200-Year-Old New Piece of Roman Puzzle Emerges, Bringing Together Ancient Map of Rome

Maps are a useful modern tool, telling us how to get places, showing us where borders lie, and illustrating the distance between two places. 

While modern technology has made the creation of and access to maps something we don’t think twice about, the creation of maps during ancient times was far more complicated. 

Without the availability of GPS, air travel, and computers, ancient civilizations had to rely on other means for the difficult task of creating maps. 

One ancient map – the Forma Urbis Romae – has been a mystery for years, serving as a complex jigsaw as researchers continue to uncover various pieces of the puzzle, including a recently discovered fragment that has just been reunited with the other existing pieces.

Sometime between 203 and 211 AD a marble map of Rome was created. According to History of Information , the map was originally composed of 150 marble slabs, and it was 18.10 meters (60ft) high by 13 meters (43ft) wide. 

“Created at a scale of approximately 1 to 240, the map was detailed enough to show the floor plans of nearly every temple, bath, and insula in the central Roman city.

The boundaries of the plan were decided based on the available space on the marble, instead of by geographical or political borders as modern maps usually are.” 

The map shows the topography of Rome as it existed at the time, including structures such as temples, houses, shops, warehouses, and apartment buildings. 

According to Discovery News , the map was created under the rule of Emperor Septimius Severus.  Severus served as emperor from 193 to 211 and was a strong leader, known for converting the Roman government into a military monarchy.   

The Forma Urbis Romae map has only been recovered in relatively small pieces.  The fragments that have been found are currently held at the Capitoline museum in Italy. 

Researchers have recovered only approximately ten percent of the map, in 1200 pieces.  They have been attempting to piece it together for hundreds of years, since the first pieces were found in 1562. 

According to History of Information, a team of researchers from Stanford University, led by Marc Levoy, began using digital technology in an effort to solve the puzzle. 

Of the 1200 pieces collected, only about 200 have been identified.  The map was originally constructed on a wall within the Templum Pacis (Temple of Peace). 

The wall still remains, but the map was partially torn down hundreds of years ago, with the remaining pieces eventually fell, shattering into hundreds of pieces.

In 2014, a new piece of the map was discovered while workers were working at a Vatican-owned building called Palazzo Maffei Marescotti. It is believed that the pieces ended up in that location during construction of a 16th century palace, as building materials were being recycled.

  According to museum officials, “the fragment relates to plate 31 of the map, which is the present-day area of the Ghetto, one of the monumental areas of the ancient city, dominated by the Circus Flaminius, built in 220 BC to host the Plebeian games, and where a number of important public monuments stood.” 

The new piece not only brought forth new information, but after recently being reunited with the rest of the pieces, it also allowed researchers to identify where three other existing pieces to the map belong.  This affords researchers a new outlook on the map as a whole.

The Forma Urbis Romae has been called a giant jigsaw puzzle.  Unlike other puzzles, it did not come with a box showing the final product, or uniform pieces. 

In fact, it did not even come with all of the pieces, and researchers may never know where the remaining pieces are located.  The discovery of the new piece allowed for more than just the placement of a single piece, but for a more holistic view of the map as a whole. 

As researchers continue to find pieces of the map they will better be able to piece together another impossible jigsaw puzzle – Roman history as a whole.

2,000-year-old Roman figure found during railway excavation

Archaeologists have unearthed an “extremely rare” carved wooden figurine, likely dating to early Roman Britain, in a waterlogged ditch north of London during excavations ahead of a major rail project.

The figurine is badly deteriorated, but it appears to depict a man dressed in a Roman-style tunic.

Pieces of pottery were also found in the ditch and date to between A.D. 43 and 70, during the Roman conquest of much of Britain under the emperor Claudius, which occurred from A.D. 43 to around 84. (Julius Caesar staged earlier invasions of Britain in 54 B.C. and 55 B.C. but he achieved no permanent hold on the island.)

The archaeologists suggest the figurine may have been deliberately placed in the ditch as a religious offering; the practice of depositing objects and even human sacrifices in bogs and wetlands was common throughout Northern Europe before the Roman conquests.

“The preservation of details carved into the wood, such as the hair and tunic, really start to bring the individual depicted to life,” archaeologist Iain Williamson of Fusion JV, a contractor for the government’s High Speed 2 (HS2) rail project, said in a statement.

HS2 will eventually connect the English cities of London and Manchester, covering a distance of more than 300 miles (480 kilometers). By law, all the land along the route must first be investigated by archaeologists before any construction, so the project has become a major source of new archaeological discoveries.

The figurine was found in July last year near the village of Twyford in Buckinghamshire. According to the HS2 statement, archaeologists from the private firm Infra Archaeology were working for Fusion JV, the main contractor for the central stage of HS2, near a wetland site called Three Bridge Mill when they found what they thought was a rotten piece of wood in a waterlogged Roman ditch.

Subsequent excavations revealed that it was a human-like figurine about 26 inches (67 centimeters) tall and 7 inches (18 cm) wide that had been cut from a single piece of wood.

“Not only is the survival of a wooden figure like this extremely rare for the Roman period in Britain, but it also raises new questions about this site,” Williamson said. “Who does the wooden figure represent, what was it used for and why was it significant to the people living in this part of Buckinghamshire during the 1st century A.D.?”

One of the most surprising things about the find is that the figurine has been preserved at all. Wooden objects usually quickly rot away when exposed to oxygen, but a few ancient wooden relics have survived because they became buried in anaerobic (oxygen-free) conditions beneath layers of sediment — in this case, waterlogged clay in the ditch.

The figurine’s arms have degraded below the elbows, along with its feet, but overall it is in good condition given its age, HS2’s statement said. 

“A surprising amount of detail remains visible in the carving, with the figure’s hat or hairstyle clearly noticeable,” the statement said.

“The head is slightly rotated to the left, the tunic at the front seems to be gathered at the waist going down to above knee level, and the legs and shape of the calf muscles are well-defined.”

A spokesman for the government heritage organization Historic England, which has studied the figurine, called it a “remarkable find.”

“The quality of the carving is exquisite and the figure is all the more exciting because organic objects from this period rarely survive,” Jim Williams, a senior science advisor with Historic England, said in the statement.

“This discovery helps us to imagine what other wooden, plant or animal-based art and sculpture may have been created at this time.”

The artifact is now being preserved and will undergo further examinations. A small, broken-off fragment of the figurine was also found in the ditch; the archaeologists hope to use it to give an accurate radiocarbon date for the wood, while stable isotope analysis of the fragment might reveal where the wood came from.