JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
One of the Roman Empire's biggest achievements was its infrastructure. Rome sponsored colossal projects, the Colosseum among them. It also built ports, amphitheaters and aqueducts.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Right. But the Empire's widest-reaching project was the construction of a sprawling road system across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
TOM BRUGHMANS: Everyone knows Roman roads are kind of a big deal. We even have proverbs that say all roads lead to Rome.
KELLY: Tom Brughmans is a Roman archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. In a study out today in the journal Scientific Data, he and his colleagues present a new road map of the Roman world.
BRUGHMANS: We created that first, highly detailed and open, accountable resource showing where are all of the roads of the Roman Empire.
SUMMERS: Their map includes more than 180,000 miles of Roman roads. That is enough to circle the Earth more than seven times, and it includes tens of thousands of miles of newly identified roads. Brughmans says it took a lot of sleuthing to make this map. Remember that most of these roads, they don't exist anymore. They've faded away or they've been paved over.
KELLY: So to construct this map, the researchers used known Roman cities and towns and villages as starting points.
BRUGHMANS: It's kind of like playing this continental-scale game of connecting the dots. The way in which we went about it was using loads of satellite imagery as well as topographic maps.
KELLY: Then they cross-referenced all that with ancient Roman maps and records. Brughmans says many of the major roads from the Roman Empire overlap with modern-day highways and roads cutting through Europe.
SUMMERS: And he also says this new data will help historians study how religion, migration, trade and even pandemics spread across the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago.
BRUGHMANS: Disease can travel along. Strongly held belief can travel along. Innovations can travel along, right? Those things, they happen over the roads - the road structure, how that disease could be transmitted, how those people migrated. And so this resource will be really valuable for increasing our understanding of these really important phenomena.
SUMMERS: The map can also be used for less practical applications.
BRUGHMANS: You can ask these kind of GPS questions of, like, how do I get from Antioch to Rome on a donkey, for example.
KELLY: To which the answer is 33 1/2 days of nonstop donkey travel. So good luck.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
