Ancient Sources

Before we begin

Why bother trusting old books at all

No inscription bearing the name Arauzona has ever been found at Velika Mrdakovica. There is no stone that says "here". What we have are three texts, written across a span of nearly six centuries, describing a town with a similar name somewhere in the lower course of a river once called Titius.

Ptolemy’s original maps were lost early in the Middle Ages. Only Byzantine copies survive, and their transcription could itself introduce errors. The Antonine Itinerary counts paces, not kilometres. The Anonymous of Ravenna writes centuries later, copying sources he never saw himself.

All authors based their work on earlier, often unverified sources. The information they provide must be used with reservation.

And yet — when all three agree, when the archaeology on the ground turns up imported pottery from four corners of the Mediterranean, and when the sheer quantity of material outstrips every neighbouring site — a text stops being a guess. It becomes the best available assumption. Good enough that local and foreign scholarship today largely agree: Arauzona stood here.

First source · 2nd century

Claudius Ptolemy

A Greek mathematician, astronomer and geographer, a native of Egypt who lived and worked in Alexandria. In his major work, the Geography (Γεωγραφική ύφήγησισ / Geographica enarratio), he compiled a list of towns across the entire known world.

Among the inland towns of Liburnia, Ptolemy lists Arausona (Άραυζωνα) — as one of eight thousand urban units he recorded across the Mediterranean. He did not merely give a name. He supplied coordinates: μβ’L” μδ’γ” (42°30′ 44°20′), applying astronomical and mathematical knowledge to geography.

Why the coordinates were not quite good enough

Ptolemy’s system of latitudes and longitudes is the forerunner of today’s system of meridians and parallels — in theory, precise and leaving no room for doubt. In practice, the problem was twofold.

First, Ptolemy’s original maps were lost early in the Middle Ages. Only Byzantine copies survive, and their own transcription could introduce further errors. Second, even assuming everything was faithfully transmitted, there remains the problem of the absolute benchmarks on which Ptolemy’s "network" relied — and the calculation of longitude, given the complex sum of distances between inland locations (as opposed to points along the coast, where benchmarks were more reliable), would not have been accurate down to the last detail.

In other words: Ptolemy gave us a number. But that number, copied for centuries by Byzantine scribes, can carry us quite some distance from the actual point on the map.

Second source · 7th–8th century

The Anonymous of Ravenna

Several centuries after Ptolemy, an unknown author from Ravenna compiled the Cosmography (Cosmographia) — a periplus, a list of coastal towns, written during the 7th and 8th centuries.

Among the towns of the eastern Adriatic and Dalmatia, the Ravenna geographer mentions a place he calls Arausione — a name close enough to Ptolemy’s Arausona to make pure coincidence hard to believe, yet different enough to show how much a town’s name could drift through centuries of copying.

The Ravenna geographer gives no coordinates. His list is, in essence, a list of names without precise geography — a maritime guide enumerating places in the order a ship would encounter them sailing along the coast. Its value lies precisely in confirming continuity: the town Ptolemy had recorded in the 2nd century was still known well enough to be mentioned six centuries later.

Third source · 2nd–3rd century

The Antonine Itinerary

Unlike Ptolemy and the Ravenna geographer, the Antonine Itinerary is not a geographical list but a road guide — a document describing the provincial roads of the Roman Empire, with exact distances between stations, measured in paces.

Describing the road along the Dalmatian coast, the itinerary places Arausa at a precisely stated distance from three known points:

At first glance this is the most precise of the three sources — a number of paces sounds like exact science. But two of the three reference points (Praetorium and Blandona) are not themselves securely located, which means these precise distances are being measured from points we are still, ourselves, looking for. The only firm point in this triangle is Trogir.

Common ground

A river once called Titius

All three sources, each in its own way, place the town within the same general area: the lower course of the river the Romans called Titius — today the Krka.

That is the one element on which literally everything agrees, and it is exactly why archaeologists look toward Velika Mrdakovica at all, rather than some other hill in the wider hinterland. There is competition — the hill fort of Dragišić, which some authors consider an equally valid contender for the title of ancient Arauzona. Had the sources been a little clearer on this point, this page would be considerably shorter.

Instead, we have what the catalogue calls "terms of high probability": the quantity and variety of local and imported material found at Velika Mrdakovica, compared against neighbouring sites, singled out this particular hill as the most likely — or almost certain — location of the Liburnian and Roman town.

Comparison

Three sources, side by side

The table deliberately does not hide the weaknesses of the sources. Each of the three texts has its own gap — which is exactly why the archaeology in the ground, and not the old texts alone, ultimately decides where the town actually stood.

A conclusion that is not quite a conclusion

Very likely, but never entirely certain

Neither Ptolemy, nor the Ravenna geographer, nor the author of the itinerary ever stood on this hill. They copied sources they had never seen themselves, calculated coordinates from instruments we would not today call precise, and counted paces along roads that have long since grown over.

And yet — when three independent texts, written six centuries apart, all point a finger at the same general stretch of coast, and the archaeology on the ground confirms that right here, at Velika Mrdakovica, someone was importing glass from Syria and pottery from Italy — probability stops being just probability.

We may never find the stone that says "Arauzona". But we have something almost as good: three old men who, from different centuries, agree on the same hill.

Sources

Toni Brajković, Velika Mrdakovica — Results of the Latest Archaeological Research (2011–2013)

Šibenik City Museum, 403rd temporary exhibition · Vodice, 2014 · ISBN 978-953-58070-0-1 · English translation: Marija Mlinar

Original ancient texts

Claudius Ptolemy, Geographica enarratio (2nd c.) · Anonymous of Ravenna, Cosmographia (7th–8th c.) · Antonine Itinerary (2nd–3rd c.)

This page was prepared for guests of Arauzona on the basis of the catalogue cited above. For scholarly reference, please contact the Šibenik City Museum.