New database reveals startling extent of Rome’s roads: We only know 3%
Source: Haaretz latest headlines
The ancient Romans did get about. At its largest, under Emperor Trajan, their empire covered about 5 million square kilometers (2 million square miles) – half the size of the United States, including Alaska. Part of the secret behind the Romans’ successful imperialism was their extraordinary transportation system: Where they went, they built roads, and that was critical to moving both troops and goods.
The burning question is how many roads they built. Some are still in use, some have disappeared under modern highways taking take exactly the same efficient route and a great many have simply vanished with time.
But we know about them from the Romans’ rich histories and achievements. Now a collaborative research effort published in the Nature journal Scientific Data by Tom Brughmans, Pau de Soto and Adam Pažout with colleagues posits that the famous ancient Romans road-building produced almost double the total length of road than we had thought.
Thought where? “We are comparing ourselves with the only previous attempt to map Roman roads on this scale, that is the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World,” Pažout explains. “This atlas mapped only about half of the length of the roads that we have in our dataset.”
How is that? Mainly because the Barrington project focused on main roads, while the new dataset also includes secondary routes as well as a number of postulated ones, he says.
The archaeologists knew that the Barrington maps were incomplete. All that remained, not a small all, was to collect the data and create a representation of the Roman road network at finer resolution. And thus they created Itiner-e, an online atlas with the biggest dataset to date of Rome’s roads, the authors say.
It is not complete. Pažout stresses, in an email, that gaps remain – for instance, places where we know there were Roman settlements but haven’t found any Roman roads. Yet.
We just note that archaeologists keep finding new stretches of ancient roadways and trails. In 2014 Pažout was part of the team reporting on an unknown road that cut through the Golan Heights 2,000 years ago. It seems they have yet more to discover, which could be done based on localized research into predictions of where these trails should be.
So, if beforehand the Romans were estimated to have built 188,555 km. of roads, the new data shows almost 300,000 km. of main and secondary roads; side roads and paths that haven’t been found but can be theorized could add much more.
Much of this is theoretical – where there should be roads even if they’re still missing. Even now, “The location of only 2.737 percent are known with certainty,” the team writes.
What? After all that? Less than 3 percent of the great and mighty Roman boulevards and long-distance roads are known with certainty? It is so, and they elaborate: 89.8 percent are “less precisely known” and 7.4 percent are hypothesized. As in, there should have been a road there even if it hasn’t been found, because if there were cities or towns or hamlets, the Romans would have roads to and between them.
Traveling the hypothetical road
The Roman Empire is generally considered to have arisen in 27 B.C.E., following the death of Julius Caesar. Its western section would survive for about 500 years until the “barbarians” finally defeated their oppressors and ended the career of the last western emperor, Romulus Augustus – though not his life. He was merely exiled to Campania.
The eastern half, with Judea inside, would morph into the Byzantine empire, which didn’t call itself that and which would officially embrace Christianity in the late fourth century. The Byzantines would soldier on until falling: in Egypt, to Arab armies in the eighth century; and in the Levant, to the Ottomans in the 15th century. Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453 and that was that.
And now we know more about how the Roman Empire managed to achieve sway over 55 million people, including the unhappy Jews of Judea: efficient transport.
How did the team map new places? Not through fresh field surveys. Chiefly, they focused on finding or postulating roads in low-coverage areas such as North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and Greece, and factored in how the roads actually would have run – not in straight lines as the birds would fly, but in winding roads over mountains, for instance. In other words, the team adjusted the math to factor in geographical realities.
The new dataset is the result of meticulous collection of all available sources, past archaeological reports and surveys, historical and modern topographical maps and aerial and satellite imagery.
Itiner-e offers 14,769 road sections, with 103,478 km. (34.6 percent) classified as main roads and 195,693 km. (65.4 percent) as secondary roads, the team says. With the caveat that less than 3 percent are certain, which Pažout helpfully explains.
“We are trying to express and describe spatial accuracy with which each road could have been localized, based on the sources that we used,” he told Haaretz by telephone and email. “Certain” means roads that the team was sure of, for example because it’s still there, or at least marked on maps, surveyed and published, et cetera.
What does it mean that 89.8 percent are less certain? “For most of the roads, we have only limited information,” Pažout replies.
“Typically, we know that place A and B were connected and between these two places there are only two points where the remains of a Roman road were observed. We don’t know the exact course of the Roman road, so the line that we draw on the map is a reconstruction (“conjectured” in the dataset) based on these few points, and historical and modern topographic maps, etc.”
Sometimes all that remains of an ancient Roman route on the surface are worn milestones.
What are their “hypothetical” roads? Mainly ones through desert regions, he explains. To cross a desert, the Romans did not build a road exactly, but rather parallel and converging tracks. “In this case we choose one of these tracks as a representation of the connection between place A and B in the Roman period,” Pažout says.
In addition, their figures include adaptation of routes, which means they include “conjectured” or reconstructed roads where there simply isn’t enough data to precisely locate the actual Roman road. “So we use additional evidence (such as historical routes through the mountain passes, etc.) that reflects topographical reality,” he explains.
For instance, a Roman road would certainly not cross a marshland that was dried in the 1950s such as the Hula in Israel; it would have gone around. They note that Itiner-e cannot show changes in the road system over time and that future research is needed to investigate this throughout the empire, which left its marks throughout the Middle East and North Africa – if only we could find them.
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