A Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire | Hacker News Reader

A Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire

imperium.ahlfeldt.se

203 pointsadamcarson28 comments

It's interesting how empty northern Italy is compared to the center. If you look at where I am in "Patavium", there are just a few towns around, and not much else, but even off in the Marche, it's dotted with quite a few places. It does seem to be missing the 'graticolato Romano' to the east of Padova, though, which is still quite visible on maps today:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Padua,+Italy/@45.5036786,1... - it's the very regularly spaced grid in the middle of the map. The land was divided up to be given to ex-soldiers to colonize.

The process of creating the grid was called Centuriation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuriation

That's great, but it would be even better with Roman-era terrain instead of modern terrain.

In my place a 1000-km² or so area was at the time a sea dotted with islands, so seeing it as sea on the map would make it more obvious why the place is devoid of roman roads.

Yeah, and Roma was a port and the sea was way closer to the city at the time, as far as I recall.

Ostia Antica [1], was ancient Rome's harbor 19 miles southwest of the city

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostia_Antica

Is there a reliable source for Roman-era terrain? Obviously some of it is known, but could we make a reliable map?

Anyway, this is a great visualization resource. Really well done.

Another fantastic historical interactive map:

http://worldmap.harvard.edu/maps/russianempire

These must take a fair amount of time to put together.

I found one posted on HN a few years ago of Middle Earth:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681505

EDIT: and another https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4972756

For navigation and other uses there is also this geospatial model of the Roman Empire:

http://orbis.stanford.edu/

Is this using/sharing data with http://pleiades.stoa.org/?

Edit: found a diagram that shows Pleiades supplying data to the Pelagios API used by this atlas: http://bsa.biblio.univ-lille3.fr/doc/gawd/gawd.html

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8113410 there was a Google Maps mashup of Wikipedia people/event dates & locations. You can filter by date, location, entity type: https://retred.org (time slider at top of page, filters at the bottom).

This is why the web was made. Full fulling the promise of knowledge for all.

So cool. If anyone is interested, I've spent the summer going through "The History of Rome" podcast from Mike Duncan (http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/), and even as someone who thought he knew a little bit about Roman history, its been fascinating - ie, we're just getting to the end of Caesar's reign, and we spent as much time on the Tarquins' as we did on Ceasar. I've heard great things about Dan Carlin, but I wanted to start from the beginning.

500 Internal Server Error ? Is there any cached version out there?

Something I've noticed, there doesn't appear to be any roads in Greece. Is this because the Romans didn't build any roads there and just used the Greek roads? If that's the case, then why aren't those roads on the map? I sincerely doubt all transport in Greece was done by ship.

Missing data I presume?

I also couldn't see the little Gaulish village we know so well.

Well, there are some relevant "stylized facts" about Greece...

- Greece has lots and lots of coastline

- The interior of Greece is largely mountains

So you'd be crazy to transport anything over land in Greece if you had the option of using water. That said, I'm sure there were some roads.

To add to the logistical difficulties, ancient Greece was covered in thick forest.

Transporting goods inland was hard because no way had yet been found to use horses to provide motive power without strangling them, hence

"It remained cheaper to transport heavy goods in bulk from one end of the Mediterranean to the other than to haul them without a river-way for seventy miles inland."

Source: The Classical World, by Robin Lane Fox http://books.google.com/books?id=nqKpSKq0v6oC&lpg=PP1&dq=%22...

"Transporting goods inland was hard because..."

I think it should be something like "was even harder than you would think because..." Sure it was harder before efficient harnesses, but even after efficient harnesses were invented, indeed even in good terrain, horses and carts were very expensive. Note that not only were railroads and trucks a lasting revolution in commerce, they were a radical improvement on another (less enduring) radical improvement before that, extensive artificial canals (very famously the Erie Canal, but there were many others, some successful). Rivers and canals were central to inland commerce in Europe and America because even with good harnesses, enthusiastic breeding of suitable strains of horses, and various other refinements horses and carts are still expensive per ton per mile.

Ancient "Greeks" seemed to have pretty good horse collars by about 1000BC, http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/chariots.htm, suitable for pulling double chariots. It seems they could provide some motive power without strangulation at least, via what is now termed a breast-collar harness.

However this http://www.machine-history.com/sites/default/files/images/ho... shows the issue, some of the artwork from Greek times seems to match with part 2. of that image, some not far from part 5. So it was, it seems, seen that the burden needed to be pulled from the horses chest and not from the neck per se.

www1.hollins.edu/faculty/saloweyca/horse/h_tack.htm describes the issue in detail and makes the same claim for the Greeks; again stating that the Chinese developed the horse shoulder harness in about 300 BCE.

An interesting subject, thanks for your citation.

Perhaps they lost that technology during the "dark age" between collapse of the Mycenaean culture (i.e. "Homeric" times, although Homer lived much later) and the rise of Classical Greece?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Egnatia Large roads were used for government purposes and private citizens had to get a permit. Commerce was conducted through shipping mostly. When Egyptian grain stopped, Thracian regions supported Rome so the roads in northern Greece improved. But that was right before the end...

How I wish I'd had this while studying Latin, or while traveling in Tunisia! Anyone traveling Europe with an interest in history could probably benefit from this.

It would be nice to narrow the timescale down a bit from just Roman era. Or, better still, to be able to look at how it changes over time.

where is the small village of indomitable Gauls

This is awesome

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