Roman fresco showing globe with mountain

Roman fresco depicting a globe with a mountain. The object dates to the 1st century CE and was found at the Villa Boscoreale near Pompeii. The artifact is located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (USA).

The mountain at the globe’s north pole most likely doesn’t represent a real location, but rather has symbolic cosmological significance. It may have represented the world’s axis (axis mundi)—the mythical point around which the heavens and Earth rotate. In the Greco-Roman tradition, Mount Olympus, for example, corresponded to it. Some scholars suggest it resembles later representations of a “magnetic mountain” from medieval and Renaissance maps, but this is likely a coincidence. It was most likely, therefore, a symbolic pole of the world, a visual sign of its center and cosmic order.