
Map of the Roman Empire Published Under CC 3.0 CC-BY - a_bonobo
http://www.ancient.eu/map_pelagios/
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jsmcgd
"An Incredibly Detailed Map of the Roman Empire At Its Height in 211AD"
[http://brilliantmaps.com/roman-empire-211/](http://brilliantmaps.com/roman-
empire-211/)

Direct link:
[https://i.imgur.com/lHoCQtt.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/lHoCQtt.jpg)

Edit: this is not as detailed, but more responsive.

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xeromal
I actually bought this map a few months ago seeing it on a reddit post. It's a
beautiful map and you can tell care was taken into producing it. It's about
$45 USD, but I'm sure that barely pays for the amount of research they put
into it. The labeling itself is meticulous.

Be warned. It ships from Germany so shipping is about 2-3 weeks.

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seszett
The map uses today's terrain and coastlines though as far as I can see, which
doesn't help understanding eg. lack of roads in former marshes.

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decafrules
Actually, if you zoom in on the Netherlands - by far the most adapted (okay,
also naturally changed) coastline since Roman times - you can see a thin blue
line indicating the contemporary coastline.

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mcv
If you zoom in, it switches suddenly between modern and ancient coastlines,
but even with the ancient coastlines, it still shows all the modern canals,
polders and the distinctive grachtengordel of Amsterdam.

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ant6n
Well I found Lutetia but not Babaorum, Aquarium, Laudanum or Petibonum.

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ghostDancer
They were erased from history to hide their failure over some wild uncivilized
Gauls.

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mrec
Very nice, but labelling is a little suboptimal - Rome itself doesn't get a
label until you zoom in twice. I don't know how this works in Google Maps
content - is there a way to assign importance weightings to individual
markers?

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maxerickson
It's using Google Maps javascript to show tiles from pelagios.org (redirects
to their blog), so they could be using any rendering system (many would of
course support importance for markers).

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hyperion2010
Very interesting, however it paints a misleading picture of the empire because
it is missing the most important trade and shipping routes: over the sea.

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toyg
I always found it incredible how Rome, a city of angry shepherds without a
real port and with no serious tradition of seafaring, ended up using the whole
of the Mediterranean as its personal highway and the heart of a huge Empire.

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mcv
Their empire lasted a while. Given enough centuries, it's not so hard to
acquire ports and develop a tradition of seafaring.

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toyg
In fact, they did the exact opposite, at least initially. Pretty soon they
were up against Carthage, a huge naval power with a long tradition of
seafaring inherited from its Phoenician roots, and were soundly beaten in the
first few engagements. The Romans turned it around by changing the game: they
developed "boarding" tech that would basically switched naval engagements into
more traditional brawls -- what caribbean pirates were still doing almost 2000
years later.

In the long run, of course they acquired real sea skills; but they only
leveraged those skills _after_ they had acquired total domination over the
Western Med. That's just amazing, imho.

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infinity0
the web page is https but tries to load the map over http :(

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godzillabrennus
And? Why does it need to be secured? After all it's an ancient map. Unless of
course you are afraid someone will snoop on your plans with Doc Brown?

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infinity0
It needs to be authenticated because I don't want to run injected javascript.
(I have no idea if the inner frame contains javascript. My browser blocked it
for me by default. That is the correct and good behaviour.)

> After all it's an ancient map.

It needs to be encrypted because I don't want other people to know that I'm
browsing the ancient map. The map itself is public, the fact that I am reading
it need not be public. Why are you afraid that I don't want you to know my
reading list? Would you tell me yours?

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gist
I never though of it that way.

An interesting idea that I had was quite the opposite.

Run a program that does totally random searches and web page requests (with
appropriate headers) in order to create so much info as to render it useless
to anyone spying. Almost like if you were running a public proxy.

Reminds me of an old Perry Mason episode where he had 25 guys help him move a
car to create a bunch of fingerprints. Maybe it wasn't Perry Mason but some
crime show but that was the concept.

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infinity0
You might be interested in this:
[https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/](https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/)

However, the difficulty is to make these requests actually look
indistinguishable from normal browsing. It might "work OK" now, but the
behaviour certainly is different from normal browsing habits. If everyone
started using this, you can bet someone would pour a lot of money into
research that filters out the automated requests. Then one basically needs to
solve steganography, which is a hard problem, harder than cryptography.

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gist
That's interesting thanks for that. I wonder if someone could put together a
product that would just sit on the network and do the same thing unattended
24x7 that didn't have to be installed as an extension.

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cygx
I find it pretty hard to navigate at higher resolutions as there's no visible
indication of the size of a river or stream after switching from zoom level
100km to 50km.

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jjuhl
Pretty cool (unfortunately also pretty slow - at least for me).

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nthcolumn
FAIL:I don't see anything.

