They create the most detailed 'Google Maps' of the roads of the Roman Empire

In the second century CE, the Roman Empire was at its zenith, boasting some 55 million inhabitants and stretching from the eastern Mediterranean basin to Great Britain. This vast territory covered more than four million square kilometers.Goods, people, knowledge, beliefs, and even epidemics circulated. This was all done through a complex network of roads connecting farms, villages, and cities, allowing emperors to maintain control of the empire.

Now, an international team led by researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Aarhus University (Denmark) has succeeded in generating the most complete and detailed digital map of roads, highways, and paths in the Roman Empire.

This exhaustive Google Maps, which they have published in Scientific Reports and it can be openly consulted at Itinerary, It includes 300,000 km of routes and allows, for example, calculating how many days it took citizens of the ancient world to travel from one point to another.

"With this tool, we lay the foundations for a better understanding of the Roman Empire," Pau de Soto, professor in the Department of Ancient and Medieval Studies at the UAB and co-author of the study, told ARA.

Communication routes in ancient times, De Soto points out, were linked not only to economic aspects—the movement of goods from one point to another within the territory—but also to social aspects, such as migrations, the spread of beliefs and cults, and even the viruses and bacteria behind certain events.

Until now, no atlas of this ancient world existed, and the few maps that did exist were of low resolution and did not allow us to know exactly where these situations were distributed. This is precisely what this new tool makes possible: "the most complete network of routes possible, covering the entire Empire and usable by any researcher."

To create this tool, Itiner-e, the researchers spent five years compiling all the information published in historical and archaeological sources and locating it using both historical and modern topographic maps, as well as remote sensing. "Transferring the compiled information to the digital system has been a lot of work, because to decide where to map the 300,000 km of roads we had to look for nearby Roman sites, or milestones [stones placed every mile with information about the road: who ordered its construction, or how many kilometers were left to the next destination]," Soto.

The published dataset nearly doubles the length of Roman roads mapped in other major digital resources. It also contains information on previously poorly documented regions and is more accurate because it adapts to mountain passes and natural corridors instead of creating straight lines. "We want Itiner-e to be, in addition to a useful scientific research tool where researchers can also upload the data they generate, a resource for disseminating information about the Roman Empire to the public, one that could even promote cultural tourism. Why not a route through the Pyrenees that follows it?" Researchers are now working to incorporate maritime and river routes, which also played a crucial role in connecting the territories of the Roman Empire, and to include the chronology of the roads, so that we can see how the routes evolved in each period of ancient Rome.