Saturday, September 26, 2026

Comprehensive study identifies all Roman roads

Well, for some values of "comprehensive" and "all":

The study published earlier this week mapped out the roads into what the Roman network could have looked like at the peak of the empire's power, sometime between the 2nd to 4th centuries AD. That network of main roads and little countryside paths didn't centralize in Rome, though. Tom Brughmans, classical archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark and one of the leads on the project, told Reuters that, "...when we consider all movement within the entire Italian peninsula, we were shocked to discover that the most central road actually follows the opposite Adriatic coastline, bypassing Rome altogether." 

It is said that history is 90% n geography and 10% common sense.   It would make no sense at all for traffic from Hispania to Syria to be routed to Rome.  The direct route goes via Constantinople:


Hopefully Stanford's Orbis will be updated to include the new found roads.  We've seen Orbis here before. 

 

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