INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC ACADEMY 7th JOINT - IOA

Geographical Sources
PAUSANIAS was one of the resources for most Byzantine historians
- including KEDRENOS, ZONARAS and MALALAS. They knew of a sport
festival at the foot of the Cronos. But the western authors must have
possessed knowledge of PAUSANIAS’ Periegesis and PINDAR’s odes.
The so-called Tabula Peutingeriana 5 (fig. 1) goes back to the
knowledge from the second till fourth centuries A. D. We can draw
the conclusion that there must have been even older knowledge. Other
parts of this route map rest upon “modern” knowledge, thus the
attached clipping from a map dated 11 th or 12 th century A. D. One can
clearly see in segment VII, 4 the village of Olympia not far away from
a mouth of a river.
The name of the map can be traced back to the recipient of this
map: about 1508 this map was created by the humanist Conrad
CELTES and handed over to the magistrate of the city of Augsburg,
Conrad PEUTINGER. Today one can find this map in the Austrian
National Library in Vienna.
After the pagan cults were abolished by Christianity, the density of
population in the region of Olympia and Elis decreased markedly.
Later, Slavic tribes immigrated into this region and gave new - Slavic
- names to the locations:
Alpheios – Rufia;
Kladeos – Laleika 6 ;
Pisa (village) – Miraka;
Olympia (region) – Andilalo 7 ; etc.
These names are recorded for the first time on a Venetian map
(fig. 2) in Battista PALNESE’s atlas dated to the year 1554. 8
Records in Literature
The first important reference to Olympia and to the Olympic
Games one can find in the Lexicon De Inventoribus Rerum published
by the Italian humanist Virgilius POLYDORUS. His lexicon deals in
several chapters with the emergence and invention of ‘things’ and
- 231 -