The book travelled further than almost any other work of its size. Latin versions circulated from late antiquity, and translations into Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, Old Church Slavonic, Arabic and a series of European vernaculars carried it across the whole Christian world, east and west, in versions that reorder chapters, add creatures and adjust the interpretations to local material. There is no single Physiologus to edit, only a family of related books.
In Latin Europe it was then absorbed into something larger. The medieval bestiary took the chapters as a base, expanded them with material from the encyclopaedic tradition, and added the illustration programmes that made the genre famous, so that the pictures most people associate with medieval animal lore belong to the descendant rather than to the ancestor. Its date and place of origin remain unsettled.
A Greek original composed in the eastern Mediterranean in the early Christian centuries is the standard view, with a range of several hundred years still argued over and no author identified. The atlas records the range rather than a date, and treats the Greek text as the head of a tradition rather than as a fixed original the versions depart from.