My parents grew up in small villages that are adjacent to one of these ancient roads (via Tiburtina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Tiburtina) and the road basically still exists as a modern road.
I remember driving near Pescara with my parents in the 1990s--they had not been back to Italy in 35+ years and they were trying to find their way back to their home towns.
We stopped the car on the side of a main road and asked a woman who was walking, "Dov'e' la Tiburtina?" (where is the Tiburtina?).
The woman responded... "QUEST'E' la Tiburtina!" (This is the Tiburtina).
Newer but similar thing with Old Spanish Trail through the southern US (and similar historic trails).
So many roads named after something or named some nostalgic but generic thing, that no one realizes when they are actually driving on the modernized version of the real thing.
Among other things, it seems most expect there to be a route 66 style or (american) rail-row insitu abandoned artifact of these roads (which do sometimes exist in stretches of realignment) but don't realize that un-abandoned places generally aren't going to abandon their roads.
ETA: Old Spanish Trail went from the Atlantic coast of Florida to the Pacific along the Gulf Coast then continued west.
But the places with continuous use to today from Texas east are now more often excluded from 'Old Spanish Trail' maps.
The only dead straight main road out of London runs very close to my house. It was the Roman military road out London and ran for a couple of hundred miles. In Saxon times it was called Watling Street.
That's not the only one. A10 from Shoreditch to Hertfordshire is dead straight and follows the route of Ermine Street, the Roman road from London to York.
Ha, funny - we visited London for a week last autumn and stayed in Kilburn near the old Paddington cemetery, and every time we took the bus into the city I found it strange how straight that road was.
I knew someone at school who got a summer job identifying lost native trails. The government wanted to resurrect them as modern trails. The result: basically every trail would have been down the middle of a divided highway or along a railway track. It turns out that native people's then didn't like walking up and down hills anymore than cars and trains do today. The project was axed.
via Aemilia, now Emilia, is alive and well all the way from Milano to Rimini. It changes name a few times, mostly with additions (e.g. "Emilia Levante" to the East of Bologna, "Emilia Ponente" to the West, etc), but it's still the same road going through a billion towns and cities...
I've been always fascinated by subway maps. The best ones are usually made manually and require update from contractors on every infrastructure extension. Were there any efforts to make autogenerated styled subway maps? Not like stylization of OSM data, but real schemes that show the whole system without sensory overload?
- M. Nöllenburg: Automated Drawings of Metro Maps, 2005. We've used that a while ago to render a few pretty images with our graph visualization library, but runtime is prohibitive (along with the requirement of a fast ILP solver).
Side note: Mini Metro is an incredible game, and the studio is still updating it with new content a decade after release! I highly recomend everyone here checking it out if they haven't already.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. Mini Metro is a game that has the player connecting metro stations together by routing them however they see fit. It's a minimalist network/graph game that's both relaxing and challenging. It uses loose approximations/abstractions of real world cities.https://dinopoloclub.com/games/mini-metro/ (highly recommended!)
I'd love to see a web map version of it based on real geography.
The Roman Empire was very advanced for the time, and it left such a huge imprint on the civilization even centuries, and thousands of years after it.
The organization was a different scale.
Fun fact: Some of the most famous battles in England in the middle ages, such as battle of Hasting, were basically 5k - 9k soldiers in each side. That's just one and a half Roman legion.
Rome, could field 12 legions at a time, and the scale was insane. I can see why the Roman Empire remained such a symbol of civilization for a thousand of years after its fall.
To be fair England was a complete backwater in Roman times, just like much of Europe away from the Mediterranean. IIRC by the 1000s Germany, France and Britain had already well surpassed their Roman population peaks, Italy on the other hand took another 500 years or so.
> The Roman Empire was very advanced for the time, and it left such a huge imprint on the civilization even centuries, and thousands of years after it.
Pictures like this make me think of all the different types of empire that have existed over the millennia. For example, you couldn't make a map like this of the Golden Horde because nomadic societies aren't nearly as road-obsessed as sedentary ones (see: ours).
People are too obsessed with comparing every other empire to Rome. I remember going to a museum with my friend who is an archaeologist and there was a fantastic exhibit on the Incan Empire. I was really enjoying it, but he was frustrated by how much of it was devoted to arguing that the Incan Empire was as cool as the Roman Empire on the latter's terms. "I don't want to hear about how the Inca were similar to the Romans. I want to hear about how they were different." That really stuck with me.
Have you read Deleuze? from your comment here I think you would enjoy his thoughts on empires and what he called “war machines” and “the state apparatus.”
Here’s a good comment on it:
The TL:DR is: for D&G 'war machines' are the specific constitution, form and alignment of a state that refuses to be a state (a nomad state). It is the tools by which a state refuses to be a state.
The state as we think of it relies upon centralization, stability and continuity--war machines are by definition nomadic, shifting locations, and leaders, decentralizing, redefining what is and isn't a periphery etc.
At the same time, both are effective at commandeering power and directing it towards a goal: even if the state claims a monopoly on being able to do this.
It is the difference between a Medieval city state and the Mongol horde, or a pirate ship, or if you prefer a contemporary example, between a modern state, and terrorist groups, marginal groups, autonomous zone festivals like "Burning man", anarchist collectives, homeless camps, etc which operate within it and on the periphery of it, while neglecting or actively disrupting the state's hegemony.
War machines can and often are coopted by state power, but they are still separate from it and disruptive to it.
No! Got a book or essay recommendation in particular? I'd definitely be interested.
I've been thinking a lot about how the idea of "American Empire" gets dismissed as "hippie crap," but it's an extremely helpful lens for understanding what global superpowers do in the modern era, as long as you have a more flexible definition of empire than "Exactly like Rome."
Just a warning: Deleuze and Guattari are notoriously hard to understand and/or wordy and unclear with their writing. Some people think that makes it not worthwhile, but I think it’s absolutely full of interesting ideas.
> understanding what global superpowers do in the modern era, as long as you have a more flexible definition
Yeah, absolutely. I remember a certain sense of enlightenment as undergraduate when a professor laid out the way the US projects military power - not through direct land occupation and control, but through deployment of a network of semi-permanent bases from which force can be rapidly unleashed on flexible terms, as well as through "advisors" that can co-opt local armies to carry out US objectives.
Coupling that with direct and indirect shaping of cultural and economic consensus across allied nations, it's hard to define the role of northamerican states with a word different from "empire".
The summary here links right to the original content. I just wanted to highlight the original for the sake of other readers clicking through quickly. There's also a much more detailed (and more interesting) writeup on the creator's page.
I've heard this one before. It only takes advantage of one dimension of the color space, though, and that bugs me. On the other hand you don't have to go look up a better palette.
If you want to keep the points theoretically ideally separated out to as many as colors as you want, you can use the "plastic sequence" for your parameters, https://observablehq.com/@jrus/plastic-sequence
There’s also an option to email the mapmaker to receive a pdf. I’m going to ask for one in hopes that it’ll blow up nicely. I think it’d make interesting wall art.
Their other maps are sick too. Is there a term for these types of visualizations, where some data is visualized in a "non-standard" way in the context of the data?
If you want to cause controversy and stir up some trouble in the ancient history community there's nothing like the topic of Roman roads. I didn't realize it until reading up on the subject. There seems to be two camps the "ancient aliens" type who argue Roman roads were built and lasted 2,000 years vs the roads were continually repaired over 2,000 years just like any other road.
[Traslate to english from wikipedia]
Isaac Moreno Gallo (1958- )1 is a Spanish engineer, historian and communicator.
Isaac Moreno is a Public Works technical engineer and graduate in Geography and History. He works in the Spanish Ministry of Development. He has carried out various projects to identify and study Roman infrastructure, especially Roman roads and hydraulic infrastructure. He has worked for various public administrations as a specialist in Roman engineering and carried out research on ancient technique, ancient topographical instruments and other facets related to this engineering.2
He has written several specialized books and participated, as a presenter, in television programs on Roman engineering. He maintains a YouTube channel where he publishes informative videos of his research.
Me myself maybe the only one here who used Roman Roads for effective travel. I bicycled from Finland to Yugoslavia in 1971. Roads were often just mud for tanks and lorries. But sometimes I found small roads with flat stones. Especially I remember the road between Ljubjana and Udine. There was quite wide road sections in the middle of nowhere completely paved with stones. This was the Main Roman Highway between EMONA and AQUILEIA says the map (https://imperium.ahlfeldt.se/index.php?id=10717). I truly wondered who the hell has built this road, because I did not know shit about any Romans.
That's really well done! I have no comment on the accuracy but it really highlights just how the Romans integrated new areas into the central empire through transportation (goods, ideas, and armies).
I will also call out the road in Africa called "Caeserea lol"
That would presumably be the city of Caesarea in Mauretania[0] which was the capital of that province. According to the Wikipedia article for the modern town at that site[1], it was also called Iol in ancient times.
This is really neat! Thanks for sharing. I wonder if there's an analogue for these routes and the roadway system there? I imagine so. I thought it was interesting how short Via Appia was. Learning Latin growing up, I imagined that to be much longer.
How can it take 2 months on foot, yet only 1 month per horse, when a horse can only travel between 25-35 miles a day, which is not twice as far as a human can travel in a day, but about equal?
Horses would often be swapped out at stations when a wealthy person would have to travel very quickly across a long distance. Maybe this is an average since the speed with which horsemen could travel would depend on the rate at which they exchanged their horses.
In an extreme example from the year 9 BC, the future emperor Tiberius traveled on the Roman Roads 330 miles (531 km) between northern Italy and modern day Mainz, Germany in 36 hours without sleep. He was rushing to the deathbed of his older brother Drusus after the latter suffered mortal injuries in a freak horse accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drususstein
Yes, for wealthy people who could swap out horses. If it was just a regular person like you or I with a horse, it wouldn’t increase your speed and even slow you down.
Horses were used for pulling or carrying loads, they are only faster on short high speeds, not long distances
About 30km/18 miles per day is a common value used in Europe. On a single day you can easily do twice that if you don't carry too much and are used to walking long distances, but it would be difficult to sustain. Also the number allows for time to set up camp (and tear it down in the morning), prepare meals, etc.
When I was a boy scout (so 16 -18 yo) we were walking as a team 50-70 km per day and could sustain that for 2-3 days. More perhaps, but there was nowhere to go any further. We were wearing 20 kg in rather uncomfortable backpacks.
On forced marches we could keep 7-8 km/h speed. And sometime we have practiced legionary walk which is alternating 200 steps jogging and 700 steps walking.
One of the badges was for walking 100 km in a day and lot of my friends got it.
But back then we were generally walking a lot, day by day, every year.
When I was in elementary school, we would do charity walks every year to raise money for the poor. They were 20 miles.
It took us all day, but if a bunch of kids between fourth and eighth grades and their nun teachers can do it, I'm surprised how many adults on this web site think it's too far.
Did you do it with a suitcase of stuff for a week- or month-long stay in another city, and contingencies like extra water, food, stove etc if you get laid over in a remote area without facilties? Did you do it rain or shine, on paved roads or muddy rutted-out dirt roads?
Well I did 30km with ~1500m height gained three-four times a week for a while. If I pushed I maybe could do 60km, but that would be no fun. Tops was 40 km on trails and 2500m gained, but that was extreme.
You need enough water, good shoes and nice weather for that. Or a flatter terrain.
On flats, 20km takes ~3.2 hours and yes you can walk 60 or 80 in a day and not drop dead at the end of it if you take care.
I wonder how long can a horse sustain that pace vs a human. Those who hike the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail), which takes 4-5 months, might do ~20 miles per day with a “zero” (rest) day every ~10 days.
The average PCT thruhike in 2012 was 152 days, or over 5 months (https://www.pcta.org/2013/how-long-does-a-pct-thru-hike-take...). Only skilled and experienced thruhikers are able to complete it, so there is serious selection bias in that figure as well.
It's only with advancements in backpacking and outdoors tech that anyone is able to do that.
I don't know why everyone in this thread seems to think titanium tent stakes and frame backpacks and gore-tex jackets and polarfleece and plastic pump-driven charcoal water filters and chocolate bars and first aid (that wouldn't kill you) were a thing during ancient rome.
My thought is that one didn't simply travel alone on horseback, but with a group and baggage, and I wouldn't expect servants to be mounted. The animals help with the baggage. You also would want a group since there are highwaymen and freebooters on the road.
I seem to recall oxen speed being about 12 miles per day.
I'm sure the author would have more details on the ambiguity. Are the walkers marching soldiers? Is the rider a courier who changes to fresh horses at waystations? It's not clear :)
Very schematic from region I live around - Geneva and Aosta are not that far on the map and seem close neighbours, but highest part of alps lies in between, passes can be brutal and far apart (>=2500m high, ie St Bernard pass from where famous dogs come from, can end up snowed anytime all year round and especially 2000 years ago, at least 6 months/year unpassable for carriages and dangerous for anything else).
I don't know if "Genava" is the same as modern day Geneva CH, but if it is, then how is can it be correct to show Vienna to the west of it? I get that a subway map abstracts the physical layout, but surely this is a mistake in the topology??
Naissus represent! I love this. Testament to Harry Beck's circuit board mapping approach - so easy to read. With Roman roads being far more 'straight' than London tube lines, it's even more suitable.
Many of the roads in Europe between cities are former roman roads. Sometimes you can even see ancient small bridges along the bigger highways.
The romans cut out entire mountains to guide roads through. Amazing work.
There's a missing road in Sardinia that I'm aware of, connecting Karalis (today's Cagliari) with Turris Libisonis (today's Porto Torres, near Sassari).
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. "
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Sometimes I wonder if we've regressed in terms of attention to quality. Here in the US, I see lots of potholes on the streets and sidewalks. Meanwhile, the ancient cobblestone roads are still functional to this day.
For one thing, cobblestone roads wouldn't last so long under the weight and shear forces of modern vehicles. Y'know when Wile E. Coyote skids to a stop so hard that the road under him wrinkles up like a rug? A loaded semi truck braking hard can actually make asphalt do that, just as an example of the kind of forces involved.
For another, cobbles that are even a little bit wet become slippery deathtraps at even moderate driving speeds. Even when they're dry, highway speeds are going to be very uncomfortably bumpy. Hard on people and hardware both.
Basically, a good driving road requires a surface that is extremely smooth but also somewhat tacky, and that really limits what other properties it can have. You can't build something like that out of durable stone.
For sure, but unfair comparison. Leave an asphalt road unattended for 10 years and it's cracked and overgrown, barely better than a dirtroad. A cobblestone at least will be salvageable, just will need a good weed wacking. Baseline quality is just higher.
Potholes are not regression. They are a good cost effect response. We can build roads that won't have potholes, but at vastly more cost, it is better in the long run to build roads as we do and then fix potholes every year.
Cobblestones also get potholes and the like when subject to heavy car traffic.
The neighbors on my block share a gravel alleyway, which develops enormous potholes over time. The city does not maintain it, so we all chip in every couple of years to have it re-graded. One of our neighbors, who happens to own a few expensive sports cars, wants us to have the alley paved with asphalt instead: but it will take twenty years of regrading before the project would break even.
Rome had the advantage of access to essentially unlimited forced labor in order to build and maintain their infrastructure. Modern engineering is absolutely superior to Roman engineering, but we do have to contend with budget constraints, at least in part because we're not using slavery to build our roads.
They still had to feed the slaves, and they were certainly not unlimited. In fact, many roads were built by Roman legions themselves, not slaves. (the engineers were also soldiers).
And just FYI roman roads were maintained. We dont have documentation on this from the early imperial period. But from the Byzantine period we know that there were local people responsible for maintenance.
And we also know that even during Byzantine times many roads were reverting to nature. Road maintence was a real problem.
> Sometimes I wonder if we've regressed in terms of attention to quality.
In a way we have, yes! In our modern society we optimize for profit. Always, everywhere. The reasons our roads won't last thousands of years is precisely that it would be less profitable.
The Roman roads wouldn’t be pleasant to drive on at all. Also the Romans certainly must have been more obsessed by profit than us? They state was built on subjugation and enslavement of basically all the people they came into contact with.
> The Roman roads wouldn’t be pleasant to drive on at all.
Sure, but that was not my point.
> Also the Romans certainly must have been more obsessed by profit than us?
I don't know, I wouldn't say "certainly". I am not really sure how one can be more obsessed by profit than us. We literally care more about profit (GNI) than our survival (climate change, energy crisis, biodiversity crisis).
> They state was built on subjugation and enslavement of basically all the people they came into contact with.
You don't really know how Rome worked, do you? Because they had slaves does not mean they enslaved "all the people they came into contact with". The Roman society is actually super interesting when you look into it.
So it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison because they serve very different purposes?
> We literally care more about profit (GNI) than our survival (climate change, energy crisis, biodiversity crisis).
So a bit like the Romans who weren’t particularly concerned about severe deforestation, soil erosion and related issues in addition to the extinction of multiple species (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holznot#Peak_wood just a hypothesis but it probably has some basis).
> does not mean they enslaved "all the people they came into contact with
They pretty much did. Especially during the late Republican period. Well not literally “all” but the populations of large/huge cities like Corinth, Carthage and others were exterminated/enslaved and millions of slave were imported into Italy to work and die in extremely gruesome conditions (depending on the estimates the numbers were comparable to the entire Atlantic slave trade)
> You don't really know how Rome worked, do you?
What makes you say that?
That’s like me replying to your claim:
> We literally care more about profit (GNI) than our survival
By asking “You don’t really know how does the modern world work, do you?”. Both of our claims were quite hyperbolical..
> So it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison because they serve very different purposes?
My point was that we could make extra-solid roads. But that would be more difficult and hence more costly. I did not mean that there is a conspiracy; it's just a system. I did not even say it's worse; it's different.
> So a bit like the Romans
You're turning it around. You said "the Romans were certainly more [...]" and I said "hmm I can't imagine being more [...] than us". So yeah, maybe they didn't give a shit, and we don't give a shit. Which is compatible with what I said (but not with what you said, which is that it was "certainly not similar").
> They pretty much did.
So you mean that from the start population of Rome to the empire around the Mediterranean Sea, they systematically enslaved everyone they encountered? So like 99.999% of the population were slaves, and the only non-slaves were the descendants of the people of the original Rome?
> What makes you say that?
The fact that you think that they enslaved "all the people they came into contact with". Romanization was more elaborate than just enslaving everybody.
> Both of our claims were quite hyperbolical..
I mean mine. Our society optimizes for the GNI, at the very real risk of causing global instability, famines, mass extinction, etc before the end of our lives. For a ton of people, it means their very survival.
Well.. that semantics, which is not something I have any interest in arguing about. I’ll restate, I’m certain that we care about the environment and sustainability much more than the Romans ever did.
> systematically enslaved everyone they encountered?
No, that was a hyperbole, I’m assumed that it would be pretty clear to most.
Again I’m not sure what’s the point of arguing about this. The were about as much slaves (as % of population) in Roman Italy as in the antebellum Deep South, except in the Roman case the conditions for most slaves were so poor was that their population could only be sustained through constant importation of new slaves.
And yes in some cases up to 90% of the population was either murdered or enslaved after some wars (eg. almost all of the people living in Carthage, in an entirely unprovoked and and unjustifiable war) and more often than not Roman conquests were followed by severe contractions of population and economic decline.
> I mean mine. Our society optimizes for the GNI, at the very real risk of causing global instability,
Perhaps. But I would not agree that’s true in relative/historical terms. Generally QoL for the overwhelming majority of the global population is better than it ever was in the past. Also we as a society are making many choices/decision that do not prioritize short term economic growth that would mostly be incomprehensible/irrational to the Roman elite.
> You don't really know how Rome worked, do you? Because they had slaves does not mean they enslaved "all the people they came into contact with". The Roman society is actually super interesting when you look into it
They certainly enslaved a hell of a lot of them. Like everyone else, they had good points and bad points but they were pretty far from a meritocratic democracy as we would think of the terms today.
The Romans hadn't invented the exact forms of the joint-stock company and limited-liability corporation yet, but they certainly had greed and short-sightedness.
The network scale, network density, frequency of use, and loading conditions are all like, orders of magnitude higher. Plus as other commenters have mentioned, weather conditions tend to be more extreme than the Mediterranean, and additionally, designing for serviceability can have significant advantages.
There is survivor bias to consider: we don't see any ancient roads that didn't survive, if it became overgrown from neglect or damaged by erosion or water or whatever.
Watch a video on roman road construction methods. It seems they prided themselves on building for the long term.
Retrieval augmented generation from incomplete archive:
The foundation of the road consists of 3’ of gravel covered with 2’ of sand forming an extremely stable base.
I seem to also recall that builders got paid half upon completion and half if the construction was still in good condition fifty years later. (Though this is probably apocryphal for the obvious reasons)
Wait till you see Canadian roads..
But the real reason is construction mafia, to keep their work going, if they made it high quality they are out of government maintenance contracts in the coming years.
Controlled-access freeways (interstates, motorways, autobahns) have much lower accident rates per mile than other roads with lower speed limits and more distractions.
Of course, the two broad categories of road largely serve different purposes, so one can't go around replacing side streets with freeways, either.
My parents grew up in small villages that are adjacent to one of these ancient roads (via Tiburtina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Tiburtina) and the road basically still exists as a modern road.
I remember driving near Pescara with my parents in the 1990s--they had not been back to Italy in 35+ years and they were trying to find their way back to their home towns.
We stopped the car on the side of a main road and asked a woman who was walking, "Dov'e' la Tiburtina?" (where is the Tiburtina?).
The woman responded... "QUEST'E' la Tiburtina!" (This is the Tiburtina).