In an age when many people may onerously make our solution to an unfamiliar grocery retailer without relying on a GPS navigation system, we’d effectively receivedder how the Romans may 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 “through which the map’s distances have been professionalportional to their actual measurement in the true world,” like virtually all these we consult on our screens immediately?
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 developed, laying roads throughout three continents, increasingly more 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 principal Roman roads together with 225 ceaseping stations have been compiled in a document known as the Itinerarium Antonini, the Itinerary of Emperor Antonius Pius.”
This excessively practical document contains mostly roads that “handed by means of giant cities, which professionalvided wagerter facilities for housing, storeping, bathing, and other traveler wants.” With this information, “a traveler may copy the specific distances and stations they wanted to succeed in their destination.” Nonetheless immediately, some seventeen centuries later, “most people wouldn’t use a paper scaled map for travel, however would as an alternative break their journey down into an inventory of submethod stations, bus stops, and intersections.” And in case you have been to try to drive throughout Europe, making a modern-day Roman Empire street journey, you’d virtually 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 Enormous David Rumsey Map Collection
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e-book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.