
A Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire - adamcarson
http://imperium.ahlfeldt.se/
======
davidw
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...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Padua,+Italy/@45.5036786,12.0850511,12z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x477eda5841ab30cf:0xc18236edaa1a2e2c)
\- 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.

~~~
huxley
The process of creating the grid was called Centuriation:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuriation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuriation)

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seszett
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.

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

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

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

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CatsoCatsoCatso
Another fantastic historical interactive map:

[http://worldmap.harvard.edu/maps/russianempire](http://worldmap.harvard.edu/maps/russianempire)

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

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

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681505)

EDIT: and another
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4972756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4972756)

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

[http://orbis.stanford.edu/](http://orbis.stanford.edu/)

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walterbell
Is this using/sharing data with
[http://pleiades.stoa.org/](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](http://bsa.biblio.univ-
lille3.fr/doc/gawd/gawd.html)

~~~
walterbell
From
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8113410](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](https://retred.org) (time slider at top of page, filters
at the bottom).

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

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crapshoot101
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/](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.

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

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Svip
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.

~~~
thaumasiotes
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.

~~~
davidweir
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...](http://books.google.com/books?id=nqKpSKq0v6oC&lpg=PP1&dq=%22the%20classical%20world%22&pg=PT172#v=onepage&q&f=false)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Ancient "Greeks" seemed to have pretty good horse collars by about 1000BC,
[http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/chariots.htm](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...](http://www.machine-
history.com/sites/default/files/images/horseTraction.jpg) 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.

~~~
arethuza
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?

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contingencies
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.

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sbmassey
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.

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kitwalker12
where is the small village of indomitable Gauls

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fiorix
This is awesome

