What have the Romans given us? It’s not a question I ask myself when I can’t sleep, but the brilliant satire that Monty Python captured in ‘Brian’s life‘. He aqueductsewage, education, irrigation, health, wine, public baths… and roads. At its peak, it is estimated that The empire’s network expanded over 120,000 kilometersbut as excavation has been carried out, more and more remains of Roman roads have been found.
On some occasions we have brought some “Google Maps” of the Roman Empirebut what we have in our hands today is the culmination of an anthological work that compiles some of the most important sources of the arteries of the empire and captures those roads is an impressive interactive map with almost 300,000 kilometers of roads.
The tool is called itiner-eand it is something that can absorb us for hours and hours.
The Google Maps of the Roman Empire
If you have already taken a tour of the mapyou should know that it is a living element. As discoveries are made and the location of the tracks is determined, the team will update the map. But what we currently have is the result of more than five years of work carried out by a team with members from both the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Aarhus University of Denmark.
In it study published in Naturedetail that it is “the most detailed and complete digital data set of roads in the entire Roman Empire” published so far. In fact, it exceeds the known length of Roman roads by more than 100,000 km thanks to both greater coverage at the focus and better spatial precision. Previously, the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations (DARMC) mapped 188,554.7 kilometers.
To do this, the researchers identified both the most important routes and the paths of archaeological and historical sources, locating them using both historical and current topographic maps.
The main sources have been the Antonine Itinerary and the Tabula Peutingeriana, but the “milestones” and settlements close to each other (for example, limits of the empire, such as those near Hadrian’s Wall) are what have allowed researchers to assume the existence of roads that connected them. Other sources include summaries of the Roman road network in specific regions, maps from the Mapping Past Societies, the Barrington Atlas or the Tabula Imperii Romani, among many others.
As a result of this work, the new map includes 299,171 kilometers of roads (to connect a territory of more than four million square kilometers), and they are divided as follows:
- 103,478 kilometers of main roads, 34.6% of the total.
- 195,693 kilometers of secondary roads, 65.4% of the total.
And it is not that more than 100,000 kilometers have been taken out of the bag, but that roads that previously crossed rivers or were simple straight lines, have now been drawn with greater precision, adapting to the topographical peculiarities of the terrain.
Now, although the work is amazing and we can see by playing with the different layers of information that many of the main roads coincide with current roads, the researchers confess that “only” the location of 2.737% of the Roman roads is known with certainty.
That is why the vast majority of itiner-e roads show the legend “hypothetical” or “conjecture”, just before detailing the record from which they took the data. This certainty depends on:
- Certainty: segments well documented in the sources, which have been digitized with high spatial precision.
- Guess: segments with lower spatial precision due to a lower level of documentation.
- Hypothetical: paths that are speculated to have existed, but for which there is insufficient evidence to classify them within one of the above groups. For example, roads in desert areas where the infrastructure was less fixed and where several parallel roads have been found.
But beyond satisfying our curiosity, something we can do with this map is… play. The team has including a function that is still in beta status and allows you to explore the time these routes took. To do this, we have to select between several points and select between four modes of land transportation:
- On foot at a speed of 4 km/h.
- By oxcart at 2 km/2.
- In an animal like a donkey at 4.5 km/h.
- And on horseback at 6 km/h.
We can also select maritime routes with speeds of 2.5 km/h downstream and 0.6 km/h upstream.
In the end, that rebel group from ‘Life of Brian’ was quite right when it came to saying that one of the most important things the Romans had done for them had been the deployment of roads. Because they were fundamental to speed up transportation within the empire’s domains, and that work is noticeable even today.
They were the foundations on which we build our roads and urban centers. It is something that becomes clear when we observe that the only place in the empire in which there was not such an important or meticulous deployment, such as Africa and the Middle East, where trade on wheels was abandoned in favor of camel caravans in the 4th-6th centuries, has consequences today.
Images | itiner-e
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