In an age when many of us could hardly make our way to an unfamiliar grocery store without relying on a GPS navigation system, we might well wonder how the Romans could establish and sustain their mighty empire without so much as a proper map. That’s the question addressed by the Historia Militum video above, “How Did Ancient People Travel Without Maps?” Or more to the point, how did they travel without scaled maps — that is, ones “in which the map’s distances were proportional to their actual size in the real world,” like almost all those we consult on our screens today?
The surviving maps from the ancient Roman world tend not to take great pains adhering to true geography. Yet as the Roman Empire expanded, laying roads across three continents, more and more Romans engaged in long-distance travel, and for the most part seem to have arrived at their intended destinations.
To do so, they used not maps per se but “itineraries,” which textually listed towns and cities along the way and the distance between them. By the fourth century, “all main Roman roads along with 225 stopping stations were compiled in a document called the Itinerarium Antonini, the Itinerary of Emperor Antonius Pius.”
This highly practical document includes mostly roads that “passed through large cities, which provided better facilities for housing, shopping, bathing, and other traveler needs.” With this information, “a traveler could copy the specific distances and stations they needed to reach their destination.” Still today, some seventeen centuries later, “most people wouldn’t use a paper scaled map for travel, but would instead break their journey down into a list of subway stations, bus stops, and intersections.” And if you were to attempt to drive across Europe, making a modern-day Roman Empire road trip, you’d almost certainly rely on the distances and points of interest provided by the synthesized voice reading aloud from the vast Itinerarium Antonini of the twenty-first century.
Related content:
A Map Showing How the Ancient Romans Envisioned the World in 40 AD
Download 131,000 Historic Maps from the Huge David Rumsey Map Collection
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Europe to this day still uses the itinerary system on its modern highways. Directions signs give the name of the next significant town, and leave it to the travelers to figure out what that might be. While Google map’s narrator diligently gives highway route numbers, even on major highways the route numbers aren’t usually displayed. Luckily, exurban intersections are usually traffic circles, so you can go around again and again, as many as three times for my purposes. In Croatia, literally, the traffic route number is displayed at the size of a postcard, and then only after you have left the rotary. It works for the locals, and I am the outsider, so I just consider it a cultural difference rather than an inefficient barrier.
Huge numbers of toponyms, including Roman ones, in alphabetic and Cyrillic text incorporate a Hebrew word root which translates as ‘the way to…’ or ‘the way of…’ The same word root appears in large numbers of personal names of people, suggesting ‘pilgrim’, plants which line the way, and animals as followers, companions and predators. My book ‘On Hidden Hebrew’ will appear shortly…
How did the Romans navigate the ocean’s
The Romans did not sail the oceans, they stayed in the Mediterranean, sailing by day and within sight of the coast where possible. The grain ships from North Africa must have struck out across open sea. They would have been able to estimate direction from the Sun, and the stars at night. Local knowledge of prevailing winds and currents would have helped.
I believe that they made the short hop across the Channel to Britain using local shipping that was better suited to the waters, it is a long and dangerous voyage out of the Mediterranean and across the Bay of Biscay and I don’t think they even tried it.
This is quite a good account: https://www.vita-romae.com/roman-ships.html