8,4:1 Sinai

At some point in the TP's history, a Christian user has added Mount Sinai to the chart. There was however no space for the mountain icon in the narrow space directly above the Red Sea and below the route-line from Clisma (present-day Suez) to Aila (present-day Aqaba), so the hill drawing had to be placed above the route-line.

This cheat has led to much scholarly confusion, since many have assumed that the route veers south, making it a detour via Mount Sinai, a centre of Christian (and possibly Jewish) pilgrimage in antiquity. An essay by Philip Mayerson, which unfortunately I have not yet been able to read, contends that Phara denotes the well-watered oasis town of Feiran in the southern Sinai.

Finkelstein 30 points out why the line drawn on the Tabula cannot denote the long route through Feiran:

The shortest possible line between these points [Clisma and Aila] crosses Sinai from west to east; indeed, the total of the distances appearing on the map between Clisma and Aila — about 170 miles — closely corresponds to the distance between Suez and Aqaba along the Darb el-Hajj. On the other hand the appearance of 'Phara' on this road is misleading; the road between the heads of these two Red Sea gulfs did not go by way of south Sinai.

The true distance by the direct route, in Finkelstein's calculation, is 265 kilometres or 175 Roman miles. The numbers on the Vienna manuscript add up to 186 Roman miles, the slight excess one would expect to arise from a few twists and turns, yet far short of the arduous journey via Mount Sinai, past Zerbal and Jebel Musa, which would be 50 per cent longer or 400 kilometres in the calculation of Eduard Sachsse.

Before we proceed, it is best to consider what we actually see in the TP. Firstly, I do not read Phara as previous scholars do, but Phira or Phiro. There appears in addition to have been some kind of copyist trouble with the route, which not even Sachsse has correctly described, despite a valiant attempt (he used an edition and did not have access to any photographs of the TP). Starting at Arsinoe at the left, we find:

1. a rightwards bend but no chicane, the words Clisma XL, no distance figure;
2. a chicane, a tear in the parchment, the remnant of a word Talbert transcribes as [ - ? - ]++ia (TPPlace449);
3. a chicane with the distance figure LXXX only
4. a chicane with the text Phiro L.;
5. a reverse chicane with the text Haila and a two-tier figure, VI at the top, and X under it. Talbert justifies the false chicane thus: "The chicane at the end of the stretch turns up, not down, to avoid the small inlet with Haila at its end."

If we discount Mayerson's position, what possibilities remain?

The first and easiest solution is to suppose that Phira is an otherwise forgotten name for one of the oases on the direct road. Sachsse proposes it represents the town of Nekhel (Wikipedia) in the central Sinai. Graf opposes this on the grounds that archaeological excavations there show the station to be Islamic and "purely medieval" constructed in the Ayyubid-Mamluk period.

Lipiński 33 argues that Phira matches the Paran (P'rn) desert region mentioned in 1 Kings 11:18, and therefore likely attaches to that region's main fort at at-Tamad, halfway between Nekhel and Aqaba.

The second solution supposes there has been a muddle. Finkelstein 30 argues it thus:

‘Phara’ or ‘Pharan’ is frequently mentioned in Roman and Byzantine sources. There is no doubt about the identification of Pharan with the Feiran oasis in Wadi Feiran in south Sinai. The remains of the town and the ruins of its churches, dating to the time when monasticism flourished in Sinai, are located in Tell Maharrad in the centre of the oasis. It is unlikely that there were two places with similar names in Sinai — Pharan in the south of the peninsula and ‘Phara’ on the Clisma-Aila road. In fact, Christian Pharan is also mentioned in the form of ‘Fara’.
All this points to an interesting error in the Peutinger map. The editor of the map probably knew of an important road existing between Clisma and Aila which crossed the Sinai peninsula; he also had information on stations along the way and the distances between them. In addition, he knew of a place called ‘Phara’ in Sinai, but apparently did not know its exact location, and confused the facts. The line giving the direction of the road, the stations and the distances between them fits in very well with the direct way from Clisma to Aila (by way of present-day Nakhl and Thamad). In place of one of the stations whose name was probably unknown to him, he put ‘Phara’ (of south Sinai) by mistake.

Finkelstein overlooks the valuable clue given by the linework, which suggest a third variant: that the TP chart-maker worked from a chorographic chart with more detailed linework which included an additional road looping south to Pharan. The trace of this may be the reverse chicane. In this case, Phira does not belong in the hook and is only "projected" there by our misreading of the chart.

To sum up, the distance L to the right of Phiro is the distance from some desert station, most probably at-Tamad, to the head of the Gulf of Aqaba. Whether the chicane contains an old name (Paran), a wilfully wrong name (Feiran) or a nothing at all cannot be determined.

Finkelstein, Israel. 1979. “The Holy Land in the Tabula Peutingeriana: A Historical-Geographical Approach.” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 111 (1): 27–34.  DOI: 10.1179/peq.1979.111.1.27.

Graf, D.F. 1996. Map 76 in The Barrington Atlas. Online.

Lipiński, Edward. 2000. The Aramaeans: Their Ancient History, Culture, Religion. Louvain: Peeters.

Mayerson, Philip. 1981. “The Clysma-Phara-Haila Road on the Peutinger Table.” In Coins, Culture and History of the Ancient World: Numismatic and Other Studies in Honor of Bluma L. Trell, Detroit: Wayne State UP. 167–76.

Sachsse, Eduard. 1928. “Die Römische Strasse durch die Sinaihalbinsel nach der Peutingerschen Tafel.” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 51 (4): 265–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27929731.