How the Ancient Romans Traveled Without Maps

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

The Largest Ear­ly Map of the World Gets Assem­bled for the First Time: See the Huge, Detailed & Fan­tas­ti­cal World Map from 1587

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

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.


by | Permalink | Comments (5) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (5)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • George Welly says:

    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.

  • Danny says:

    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…

  • Seraphine Rodrigues says:

    How did the Romans nav­i­gate the ocean’s

  • Andy Goss says:

    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

  • Ken says:

    “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.”

    Thus prov­ing dad right!

Leave a Reply

Quantcast