much the known world. Ptolemy lists a huge number of cities, tribes, and sites and places them in the world. It is uncertain what Ptolemy's names correspond to in the modern world, and a vast amount of scholarship has gone into trying to link Ptolemaic descriptions to known locations. It was the Romans who made far more extensive practical use of geography and maps. The Roman transportation system, consisting of of roads, could not have been designed without the use of geographical systems of measurement and triangulation. The cursus publicus, a department of the Roman government devoted to transportation, employed full-time gromatici (surveyors). The surveyors’ job was to gather topographical information and then to determine the straightest possible route where a road might be built. Instruments and principles used included sun dials for determining direction, theodolites for measuring horizontal angles, and triangulation without which the creation of perfectly straight stretches, some as long as , would have been impossible. During the Greco-Roman era, those who performed geographical work could be divided into four categories: Land surveyors determined the exact dimensions of a particular area such as a field, dividing the land into plots for distribution, or laying out the streets in a town. Cartographical surveyors made maps, involving finding latitudes, longitudes and elevations. Military surveyors were called upon to determine such information as the width of a river an army would need to cross. Engineering surveyors investigated terrain in order to prepare the way for roads, canals, aqueducts, tunnels and mines. Around AD 400 a scroll map called the Peutinger Table was made of the known world, featuring the Roman road network. Besides the Roman Empire which at that time spanned from Britain to the Middle East and Africa, the map includes India, Sri Lanka and China. Cities are demarcated using hundreds of symbols. It measures high and long. The tools and principles of geography used by the Romans would be closely followed with little practical improvement for the next 700 years. India A vast corpus of Indian texts embraced the study of geography. The Vedas and Puranas contain elaborate descriptions of rivers and mountains and treat the relationship between physical and human elements. According to religious scholar Diana Eck, a notable feature of geography in India is its interweaving with Hindu mythology, No matter where one goes in India, one will find a landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests,