Region
Asia
Listen to the story
Asia, the Roman province in Asia Minor, is lettered in red across the map, and its five letters are stretched to an extreme. The name had to cover a huge span, and the mapmaker, rather than repeating it as he did with Mount Taurus, simply pulled it apart. The gaps crowd the roads: the letter I sits on the stretch between Pergamum and Gerame, splitting the distance figure twenty-five in two, and to make room for the final A, the name Pella was pushed back onto the previous stretch. Asia is one of five of the region's eight provinces named on the map, alongside Phrygia, Caria, Lycia and Rhodes.