According to , the shortest route between Olisipo (currently Lisbon) and Rome was 2,496 km and took 679 hours on foot (or 453 on horseback)
A high-resolution digital map now allows you to plan routes along 300,000 km of ancient roads from the Roman Empire — and almost doubles the known extent of the ancient Roman road network.
Combining historical records and modern cartography techniques, a team of researchers mapped hundreds of thousands of kilometers of roads — work that practically doubles the hitherto known extent of the Roman road network.
The dataset was published on November 6th in the magazine Scientific Dataalong with a designated online platform , which the study co-author, Tom Brughmansdescribes as being a “Google Maps of Roman roads”.
“It is a growing resource, open to the community, which can continue to add information to ensure that it remains the best possible representation of our knowledge of where all the roads in the Roman Empire were located”, explains Brughmans, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, cited by .
The researcher hopes that this data set will “revolutionize our understanding of how people, ideas and infectious diseases spread two thousand years ago. Understanding these patterns can help us better understand the challenges we currently face”, he adds.
The ancient Roman Empire was extremely influential, with a vast domain that, at its peak, encompassed 5 million km², controlled from the center of Romenear the coast of Italy. Today, its echoes remain alive – its literature and propaganda, its graffiti, its art and its architecture.
Its road network was also legendary: a vast web that spanned the entire empire, considered crucial to the expansion and maintenance of Rome. Such was his skill and his meticulous recording that, even thousands of years later, we still find these ancient paths, sometimes in the most unexpected places, highlights the .
O “Google Maps” romano
Previous attempts to map the road network of the Roman Empire had produced incomplete databaseswith low spatial resolution and location estimates rather than evidence-based reconstructions.
“Although roads are one of the best-known aspects of Roman history, it is surprising how much we still ignore about them,” he says. Catherine Fletchera historian at Manchester Metropolitan University, in the United Kingdom, who was not part of the study.
The researchers started by identify the Roman roads from previous studies — including atlases, surveys, historical and archaeological sources, as well as already recorded milestones.
They then compared this information with modern and historical aerial photographs, topographic maps and satellite images. Each section was digitized with high spatial resolution and then integrated into the Itiner-e platform.
The resulting map includes almost 300 thousand kilometers of roads existing around the what 150 dC, when the empire reached its greatest territorial extent.
The higher resolution of the analysis made it possible to map an additional 200 thousand kilometers of secondary roads. By combining different sources, researchers were able to more accurately represent winding roads that traversed difficult terrain, correcting previous estimates based on unrealistic direct lines, for example over mountain passes.
The study also reveals that the location of just 3% of Roman roads is known with complete certainty.
Another 7% are considered hypotheticalas they were identified but not accurately located or verified between different sources. The rest are conjectural and are based on scarcer documentation.
“It was a big surprise It’s a somewhat disconcerting finding,” admits Brughmans. “But that 3% certainty does not represent a failure — it is rather a call to action. It gives us a confidence map that clearly shows what we don’t know and where we should look next.”
The archaeologist César Parcero-Oubiñafrom the Institute of Heritage Sciences of the National Research Council of Spain, praises the map, highlighting that “it allows us to better understand the logic behind the construction of these roads, and to understand because they follow the routes they follow”.
Fletcher agrees: the project “does an excellent job of bringing together the data on Roman roads in an accessible formatwhich will be a huge asset for researchers planning new projects, while also creating an attractive online resource for the general public.”
The database is also an important step towards understanding the movements of people and diseases for thousands of years — for example, analyzing the spread of pandemics such as the Antonine Plague and the effectiveness of containment measures. “Roads shaped the way these pandemics unfolded and the impacts they had,” notes Brughmans.
However, the authors recognize that the map does not show, for now, the evolution and transformations of the road network Roman path after AD 150, nor the degree to which the Romans reused or adapted preexisting paths.
Reconstruct based on solid evidence how these systems evolved throughout the Roman period remains impossible without chronological data on the construction and changes to the roads, the study authors note.
