The Digital Atlas of Ancient Roads “Itiner-e” aims to host the most detailed open digital dataset of roads in the entire Roman Empire.
The Digital Atlas of Ancient Roads, was launched by an international team of archaeologists, historians, and digital humanists led by the CNRS (France), the École française de Rome, and the University of Bordeaux Montaigne.
For the first time, scholars and the public can explore more than 100,000 kilometers of ancient roads – Roman, Persian, Byzantine, and pre-Roman routes – on a single interactive platform that combines cutting-edge GIS technology with the latest archaeological and epigraphic evidence.
What Itiner-e offers:
- A dynamic map covering Europe, North Africa, the Near East, and parts of Central Asia (from Britain to the Indus).
- Over 30,000 ancient road segments georeferenced and dated, drawn from the Barrington Atlas, the Tabula Peutingeriana, the Antonine Itinerary, the Bordeaux Itinerary, and thousands of milestones and modern archaeological surveys.
- More than 15,000 ancient place-names (cities, mutatio stations, mansiones, forts) linked to Pleiades and Trismegistos identifiers.
- Integrated epigraphic corpus: every known Roman milestone (over 4,000) is plotted and photographed where possible.
- Network analysis tools that allow users to calculate real travel times and distances using ancient speeds (wagon, horse, foot, mule train) and terrain difficulty.
- Open data: all layers are downloadable in GeoJSON, Shapefile, and CSV formats under CC-BY 4.0.
Key features that excited researchers at the launch
- Users can overlay the Roman road network with modern satellite imagery, LiDAR hillshading, or historical maps (Tabula Peutingeriana, 19th-century military surveys).
- A “least-cost path” function reconstructs probable routes where no physical remains survive, using ancient criteria (avoiding steep gradients, favoring valley floors).
- Integration of the Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World (ORBIS) data, now updated and expanded.
- Mobile-friendly interface and upcoming offline mode for fieldwork.
Dr. Katrin Abu-Elmagd (CNRS, principal investigator) stated at the launch event held at the École française de Rome: “Itiner-e is not just another map. It is the first truly diachronic and collaborative atlas of ancient mobility. Anyone – from a high-school student to a professional archaeologist excavating in the Syrian desert – can now see exactly where the Romans, Persians, or Carthaginians walked, and how their roads evolved over a thousand years.”
The platform has already revealed surprising findings:
- A previously unmapped 180-km Roman road branch in northern Mauretania Caesariensis (Algeria), identified through satellite analysis and confirmed by milestone readings.
- Evidence that the Via Appia continued southeast of Beneventum along a more direct coastal trajectory than previously thought.
- Clear visualization of the shift of major trade arteries eastward under the Byzantine and early Islamic periods.
Within hours of launch, the site (https://itinere.cnrs.fr) recorded over 50,000 unique visitors. The Israeli Antiquities Authority and Jordan’s Department of Antiquities announced they will integrate Itiner-e data into their national heritage GIS platforms.The project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant “Desert Networks”) and the French National Research Agency, will continue until 2029, with planned extensions to the Persian Royal Road, the Silk Road branches, and the Inca qhapaq ñan in South America.As Professor Pau de Soto (University of Barcelona), co-director of the project, summed up:
“Roads were the internet of antiquity. Itiner-e finally gives us the bandwidth to understand how the ancient world was truly connected.”
The Digital Atlas of Ancient Roads is freely accessible to everyone at https://itinere.cnrs.fr and already available in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German, with Arabic and Modern Greek versions scheduled for 2026.
