In an age when many people might onerously make our technique to an unfamiliar grocery retailer without relying on a GPS navigation system, we would nicely gainedder how the Romans might establish and sustain their mighty empire without a lot as a proper map. That’s the question addressed by the Historia Militum video above, “How Did Historic People Travel Without Maps?” Or extra to the purpose, how did they travel without scaled maps — that’s, ones “by which the map’s distances had been professionalportional to their actual measurement in the actual world,” like nearly all these we consult on our screens right this moment?
The surviving maps from the traditional Roman world have a tendency to not take nice pains adhering to true geography. But because the Roman Empire broadened, laying roads throughout three continents, increasingly Romans engaged in long-distance travel, and for probably the most half appear to have arrived at their intended destinations.
To take action, they used not maps per se however “itineraries,” which textually checklisted cities and cities alongside the way in which and the distance between them. By the fourth century, “all predominant Roman roads together with 225 ceaseping stations had been compiled in a document known as the Itinerarium Antonini, the Itinerary of Emperor Antonius Pius.”
This excessively practical document consists of mostly roads that “handed via massive cities, which professionalvided guesster facilities for housing, storeping, bathing, and other traveler wants.” With this information, “a traveler might copy the specific distances and stations they wanted to achieve their destination.” Nonetheless right this moment, some seventeen centuries later, “most people wouldn’t use a paper scaled map for travel, however would as a substitute break their journey down into a listing of submeans stations, bus stops, and intersections.” And in case you had been to aim to drive throughout Europe, making a modern-day Roman Empire street journey, you’d nearly certainly depend on the distances and factors of interest professionalvided by the synthesized voice learning aloud from the huge Itinerarium Antonini of the twenty-first century.
Related content:
A Map Presenting How the Historic Romans Envisioned the World in 40 AD
Download 131,000 Historic Maps from the Big David Rumsey Map Collection
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
