roman_roads — Roads of the Roman Empire (Itiner-e, 2024)

Description

The network of the roads of the Roman Empire (ca. 300 BCE to 300 CE) from Itiner-e, a digital atlas of Roman roads compiled by P. de Soto, A. Pažout, T. Brughmans and many collaborators (projects MINERVA, Aarhus University, and Viator-e, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). The roads were identified from the scholarly literature (atlases, regional studies, survey and excavation reports, gazetteers and milestones), located on modern and historical topographic maps and aerial and satellite imagery, and digitized as 14,769 road segments, each between two ancient places or road crossings, covering the empire at its largest extent (ca. 150 CE). The data were collected between 2020 and 2024.

A node is an end point of road segments (a place or a road crossing), and an edge is a road segment. The network was constructed here from the geometries of the segments: the end points of segments that lie within 1 mm of each other (in the World Mercator projection of the data) are merged into one node, which joins the segments into 13 connected components (the main landmasses and islands; the authors report 14). The network is undirected; some places are joined by several segments (parallel edges). The courses of the roads (the polylines) are not included, and neither is the field Route_Type, which repeats the road type as a number, and the constant fields MaxSimpTol and MinSimpTol.

The data are the canonical 2024 version (version 1.3 of the Zenodo record, September 2025). The earlier versions of the record contain the same segments with the same lengths and attributes, except for corrections of the text fields (version 1, which also has the geometries in longitude and latitude, with more points) and of the geometries of 19 segments (versions 1.1 and 1.2); they are not included. A growing version of the atlas is maintained at itiner-e.org.

The network has the following properties:

Nodes: latitude and longitude, the geographical position (converted from the World Mercator coordinates of the data).
Edges: fid, the identifier of the segment; name, its name, formed by the names of the places at its ends (ancient names where known); type, Main Road or Secondary Road; certainty, the certainty of the location of the road's course (Certain, Conjectured or Hypothetical); lower_date and upper_date, the years of construction and abandonment of the road (negative for BCE), and lower_date_error and upper_date_error, the possible time spans before and after them (NaN where unknown); construction_period, the emperor or magistrate under whom the road was built (if known); itinerary, the ancient name of the road or the itinerary that it is a part of (e.g. Tabula Peutingeriana); description, a brief description; contributor, the person who digitized the segment; bibliography, the sources used; length, the geodesic length of the segment (m); avg_slope, the average slope along the segment (degrees); passability, a number between 0 and 1 (undocumented upstream).

Tags

Transportation Roads Spatial Weighted Multigraph Metadata

Citation

P. de Soto, A. Pažout, T. Brughmans, P. B. Vahlstrup, Á. Auir, T. Bongers, J. E. B. Christoffersen, M. Crépy, M. H. Johansen, J. Lewis, L. Manière, M. R. Massa, L. M. H. Møller, B. Redon, G. Renda, H. Şahin, A. Sobotková, A. L. Spatzek, P. Verhagen, B. Weissova, "Itiner-e: A high-resolution dataset of roads of the Roman Empire." Scientific Data 12, 1731 (2025) 10.1038/s41597-025-06140-z Sci-Hub
P. de Soto, A. Pažout, T. Brughmans et al., "A High-Resolution Dataset of Roads of the Roman Empire: Itiner-e static version 2024." Zenodo, version 1.3 (2025) 10.5281/zenodo.17122148 Sci-Hub

Upstream URL OK

https://zenodo.org/records/17122148
https://itiner-e.org

Upstream license

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Networks

Tip: hover over a column header for a description.

Column legend

$\left<k\right>$: Mean degree
$\sigma_k$: Standard deviation of the degrees
$\lambda_h$: Largest eigenvalue of the Hashimoto (non-backtracking) matrix
$\tau$: Random walk mixing time
$r$: Degree assortativity
$c$: Global clustering coefficient
$\oslash$: (Pseudo-) diameter
$S$: Relative size of the largest component
NPs: Node properties
EPs: Edge properties

Name	Nodes	Edges	$\left<k\right>$	$\sigma_k$	$\lambda_h$	$\tau$	$r$	$c$	$\oslash$	$S$	Kind	Mode	NPs	EPs	gt	GraphML	GML	csv
roman_roads	10,406	14,769	2.84	0.84	2.84	109221.01	0.13	0.08	316	0.87	Undirected	Unipartite	latitude longitude	fid name type certainty construction_period itinerary description contributor bibliography lower_date lower_date_error upper_date upper_date_error length avg_slope passability	561 KiB	685 KiB	671 KiB	696 KiB