Roman roads weren’t so straight after all

An oxcart on a road near the ancient city of Timgad in Algeria

Itiner-e, Artas Media

Roman roads weren’t as uniformly straight as commonly thought, according to a digital reconstruction of the vast ancient road network that challenges centuries-old assumptions.

“All roads lead to Rome? They are all straight? We still walk Roman roads in the region today? These are widely held assumptions, even among academics,” says Tom Brughmans at Aarhus University in Denmark.

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While observations from archaeological digs and surveys have sometimes dispelled these assumptions, Brughmans says it was unclear how accurate they were at the full continental scale of the Roman road network, which connected Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and parts of western Asia.

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Last year, Brughmans and his colleagues used topographic mapping, satellite imagery and historical sources to create a map of roads throughout the Roman Empire in AD 150, totalling almost 300,000 kilometres in length – more than double what previous data suggested.

The team has now used the map’s dataset to analyse the topography and structure of ancient roads in terms of their slope, elevation, orientation and straightness, to answer key questions about the Roman road network’s structure. The results were then compared with the modern transport network.

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The analysis revealed that Roman roads were mostly straight, but generally only in places where the landscape permitted, such as lowland regions in western Europe and North Africa. In mountainous regions, roads were less straight than modern roads, probably due to topography and technology limitations. Major modern roads tend to be straighter than ancient roads, the study shows, since they are designed to facilitate faster travel by car.

Brughmans and his colleagues also found that around 90 per cent of Roman roads were built with a slope gradient that could permit the passage of animal-driven carts and wagons – including through the Alps. “This suggests that the Romans were dedicated to maintaining and improving overland accessibility and connectivity on an empire-wide scale,” says Brughmans.

Meanwhile, Rome wasn’t as central as the medieval proverb “all roads lead to Rome” suggests. Provincial capitals consistently served as key crossroads, mediating overland communications in their respective provinces. Major public and military roads served as crucial communication arteries, facilitating the flow of goods, people and ideas on the provincial level, according to Brughmans.

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While some post-Roman cultures kept the same roads and routes into modernity, others didn’t, the study found. According to Brughmans, the reasons for this variability could be massive, such as the industrial revolution, or dependent on local decisions, for example, a town opting to not have a railway station, causing gradual depopulation and decreased investment in road infrastructure. “Our results suggest there are thousands of these stories to be told,” says Brughmans.

“Interestingly, the correlation between the ancient network and the modern network shows that, in some ways, the Romans created the future geography of Europe,” says Ray Laurence at Macquarie University in Australia. “The key limitation to this approach is that the road network was formed over 600 years, but little account for temporal differences has been included in the study.”

Journal Reference:

Nature Communications DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-75453-3

Source: New Scientist