Introduction

A most interesting and enigmatic cartographic text has apparently escaped the notice of historians of cartography – an epigram of Philip of Thessalonica, who wrote in Rome during the reigns of Tiberius (14–37 CE) and Gaius (37–41 CE). This epideictic epigram (Anth. Pal. 9.778) praises an artistically woven tapestry that was sent as a gift from a queen to an unnamed, reigning Caesar, presumably one of the aforementioned Roman emperors. The tapestry itself is said to display the inhabited world and the surrounding Ocean. We are evidently dealing here with a world “map” done in either wool or linen, making it perhaps one of the earliest recorded mappaemundi in the literal sense of the term (i.e., “cloth of the world”). It should be noted here that the image of weaving is used extensively in connection with weaving narratives, so literary and visual productions, in which the world may be described, are neatly linked.

Philip's tantalizingly brief poem prompts several questions. Who was the queen who made the tapestry and sent it as a gift? What picture of the world are we to imagine on the tapestry? What is the cartographic source(s) for the “map”? In seeking to answer these questions, however provisionally, the present chapter opens our discussion of Jewish geographical conceptions with a cameo of the subject at hand.