A Roman Holiday

This follows on a map story here. Next history map is here. 

Update : check out below how a new map, itiner-e, updated the Roman Roads view.

Update 2: speaking of malaria in second map, appended maps on trade routes that triggered the Black Plague in the 14th c. Mediterranean.

Update 3: And here is a news story on Alexander the Great's port rediscovered in So. Iraq, well inland today of the then Persian Gulf.

Not William Wilder's 1953 Gregory Peck & Audrey Hepburn flick (Wikipedia)! When drawing up a map of Apostolic Palestine for local Catholics, I ran across Ancient World Mapping Center (AWMC) at UNC-Chapel Hill. While their web app (ArcGIS Online) is a cool one-stop-shop for their rich data set - for ex. I cannot do point clustering (Comet Assistant) with my standard Argis Pro desktop license -  I loaded, picked apart an re-sorted some of their data for some interesting insights. 

Apostles in the Levant

That is what the Middle East was called in the Middle Ages (east of Western Europe where the sun rises or "soleil levant") and various ArcGIS Online sources composited this map. This was partly to show layout to a new "GIScionadio" (GIS aficionado). It shows Apostle Paul's long travels allowed by the Roman road infrastructure... 10,000 km. acc. to David Souchet's video on same (YouTube)!

click to enlarge, Tabloid size here

Ancient Roman environment

AWMC posted so many data that, failing clustering the points 😕 I clustered the features into environment and infrastructure groups (I may return to other s.a. Etropius Gazetteer & VF- & TTT-prefixed data groups I asked UNC about). This complete set of shape files shows the distribution of many features, some of which are tiny. Their legend is so good I kept it as-is, except for the Roman Empire extent I blended to mute it. 

click to enlarge & Tabloid size here

Look at the water features for example: you'll notice that the Danube and Ural rivers deltas in the Black & Caspian Seas respectively. But for ex. in the Tigris & Euphrates valleys and Arabian Gulf, the shoreline shift & inundation areas are significant, as described next.

Arabian Gulf

click to enlarge, original here

While I ask UNC for their metadata, see the comparison among current & antiquity open water (sea + rivers in original tan), inland water (inundated in blue) & late open water (? in pink). What struck me is the extent of inundation in the Tigris & Euphrates (top left) and in the present-day Gulf States (bottom) or in ancient Persia across the Gulf. 

Also in North Africa in the main map, I remember from high school Latin that present-day Sicily & Maghreb were a wheat belt: indeed "Carthago delenda est" (Carthage must be destroyed) comes from the wealth of the North African coast competing with Rome at the time. So, like my CLIWOC maps of tall ships captains' logs here, here are more climate data points on a historic time-scale.

Britannia

click to enlarge, original here

Likewise we see how the East Anglia marshes (in blue) went far inland, also described in my blog here - medieval villages from a necklace bordering it - and present day coastal Netherlands (in pink) without dikes or windmill pumps was all under water.

Ancient Roman infrastructure

Here you see the roads the Romans are famed for, where settlements & bridges indicate their hold on empire-building. I also add a curious study of malaria spread detailed here.

click to enlarge, Tabloid size here

Roads

In this closeup of Roman Britain, you see the network cross-country that surpassed any for a millennium afterward or more. I lived in Cambridge - Duroliponte then (Pleiades),  Latinised Celtic place‑name usually understood as “fort at the bridge” or “stronghold by the bridge” (Wikipedia) - and while Castle Hill was that Roman fort's locus, it also lay next to Reach an inland port in the pre-medieval marshlands (see above), and along the route you see angling up to the Wash indentation to the North Sea.

click to enlarge, original here

In fact the boomerang shaped route next to present-day Cambridge had a hilarious misfit described in this blog here: roads were built from both ends, from an unknown port near Kings Lynn (of later Hanseatic League) to the North and from Londonium to the South. While surveying is one thing Romans excelled at - they spanned the entire Roman Empire after all - the construction met in the middle, not far east of present-day Cambridge with a fifteen foot offset... the jog is still there today (click to enlarge):

Malaria

On the main map you see the overlay tones in blue (high) & greyscale (black to white the lowest): two millennia later the Po River Valley lost more people to Malaria than to WWII fighting I learned while living in Milan over a decade ago. The French coast of the Bay of Biscay was a marshland only dried when Napoleon planted pine trees for boat building. The present-day Rhone delta halfway in between is also blue. Interestingly the East Anglia marshlands North of present day Cambridge don't feature, due to colder climes? The Nile delta is also a surprise, but the original map here shows it warm not hot malaria-wise, which the overlay here doesn't show.

Conclusion

This is one interesting data set contrasting some changes (higher water inundation) and some constants (malaria in marshlands). Please enjoy some further exploration in the AWMC original ArcGIS Online Experience here: it's super easy to navigate... kudos to the UNC Antiquities team for the dataset and the web map!

Roman Roads update

"Itiner-e: the digital atlas of ancient roads" here is the latest update on the subject. It fills in (orange & red) the AWNC network (purple overlay), say, in present-day Greece, Spain, France & England.

click all screenshots to enlarge

Bonus

Following on Malaria in the Mediterranean & too beautiful to pass up (HT Ed Gonzalez Aguilar-Priego, LinkedIn): trade-route maps show how trade triggered the Black Plague in the 14th c. Mediterranean, in reaction to mitigating crop losses & starvation following a 'volcanic ash winter' (as in 'nuclear winter'); Climate-driven changes in Mediterranean grain trade mitigated famine but introduced the Black Death to medieval Europe (Communications Earth & Environment, click images to enlarge, straight from the paper).

Fig. 3: Grain trade and plague dispersal

"Main aspects of the Venetian, Genoese and Pisan grain trade network that prevented much of Italy from starvation in 1347 CE but also brought the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis to Venice and other Mediterranean harbours during the second half of 1347 CE (Table 1), from where it spread rapidly. Location of the tree ring-based climate reconstructions is indicated (with two sites in Scandinavia not shown). Map is an equal-area, pseudo-cylindrical Mollweide projection with greyscale referring to elevations above sea level."

Fig. 4: Onset of the Black Death in southern Europe

"A The first reported plague outbreaks in 1347 CE in southern Europe (red stars), together with the assumed routes of Venetian and Genoese grain ships (black lines). B Subsequently reported plague outbreaks between January and May 1348 CE (orange stars), together with earlierde outbreaks (red stars). C Plague outbreaks reported in June 1348 CE or with unspecified date in the same year (yellow stars), superimposed on earlier outbreaks (orange and red stars). D All known plague outbreaks in 1347 and 1348 CE (red, orange and yellow stars), together with major Italian cities and regions that were most likely not affected by the Black Death during this period (green stars). Supplementary Data S4-5 (and ref. 4.) provide details on plague outbreaks, stars refer to cities while less specific locations are indicated by shadings of the same colour codes, and the map is an equal-area, pseudo-cylindrical Mollweide projection with greyscale referring to elevations above sea level."

 

Fig. S4. "A set of year-by-year maps...

... of reconstructed summer season(June-August) self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index (scPDSI) using a 5414-point half-degree longitude-by-latitude grid of an on an [sic] updated version of the Old World Drought Atlas (OWDA) (4). The JJA scPDSI reflects spring-summer soil moisture conditions and is [sic] uses regression-based climate field reconstructions."

(GIF by author from figure: dryer, browner indicates 'volcanic ash winter')