Roman Roads (2017)
sashamaps.net
sashamaps.net
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).
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_Peutingeriana
(Check out one of the full size scans in the links)
- 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).
- LOOM: https://github.com/ad-freiburg/loom and https://loom.cs.uni-freiburg.de/global
I hope someone builds a web version of Mini Metro with this on top of OSM.
(Not affiliated, just a fan)
https://loom.cs.uni-freiburg.de/global#subway-lightrail/octi...
Schematization took around 2 minutes according to the statistics, it really doesn't look that bad.
I'd love to see a web map version of it based on real geography.
I wonder if anyone's tried running it with the Tokyo transit system.
https://www.yworks.com/assets/images/blog/tokyo.1e410d12c2.s...
There are more here in the article (clicking an image opens a slideshow): https://www.yworks.com/blog/automatic-metro-map-generation
That's only a very small fraction of the transit system in the Tokyo metro area. There's over 800 stations, and over 100 train lines.
https://video-images.vice.com/articles/593594e8c270a8484d1d1...
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.
Some even say.. the empire never ended.
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/832eri/comm...
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."
https://youtu.be/M7fqHn3ydzM?si=FPdw8kLA9KgKbdp9
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.
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.
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
https://gofiguremath.org/natures-favorite-math/the-golden-ra...
https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/culture-and-heritage/...
He have this old web : https://viasromanas.net/ with very good maps and this one https://www.traianvs.net/
[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.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Moreno_Gallo
https://www.youtube.com/@IsaacMorenoGallo
If you want to see more he have this documentary serie in full english. Called "Roman enginering"
https://youtu.be/MNU40dq5B0U?si=wbpfZa5MVG5O0oMQ
For me he is one of the greatest experts in Roman engineering in the world.
I will also call out the road in Africa called "Caeserea lol"
Thanks for clarifying!
I seem to recall oxen speed being about 12 miles per day.
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
If one of the main characters in The Fast and the Furious gets hurt in a street race, would not his teammates race to him as fast as they could?
Horses were used for pulling or carrying loads, they are only faster on short high speeds, not long distances
And I walk about 10km daily in one session and often do 30+km hikes.
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.
Kids these days are often a lot fitter than adults. I know people who think a 10 minute walk is too far.
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.
Good shoes and good motivation.
I am not doing this anymore.
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.
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.
You are thinking about military marches, which include supplies, setting up camp etc.
A man on a bike beats a horse over almost all distances, especially long distances. The only interesting competitive distance might be a flying 400m.
Also, AFAIK, the Romans did not have bicycles.
ps. I raced this event twice in the early 1980s when they had a mountain bike division, and still have scars on my right arm from one of them.
They actually demonstrate how they got the roads so straight.
Britain's Ancient Tracks with Tony Robinson https://m.imdb.com/title/tt6165532/
https://www.audleytravel.com/jordan/country-guides/the-kings...
Was it not Roman enough, ie not built by Romans so not on the map? Or did it not exist during Roman times?
From the title I thought it would be this project (called "roads to Rome"): https://benedikt-gross.de/projects/roads-to-rome/
Hinc illuc pervenire non potes.
brutus ad sum too
caesar sic in omnibus
brutus sic in hat
caesar adsum iam forte
pompeius aderat
caesar sic in omnibus
pompeius inis at
Great job
But you made the same bad comparison as the original one since only the asphalt road can bear the loads of modern traffic.
Cobblestones also get potholes and the like when subject to heavy car traffic.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/pompeii-fixed-poth...
None of that has any relation at all with potholes. Potholes are dangerous and may not be even noticeable at a distance.
Of course, the two broad categories of road largely serve different purposes, so one can't go around replacing side streets with freeways, either.
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.
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.