How 2,000-year-old roads predict modern-day prosperity
washingtonpost.comAlternate hypothesis: locations 2000-year-old cities predicts modern day prosperity.
And also locations of 2000-year-old cities predicts locations of 2000-year old roads -- uncontroversial I think.
The proposed mechanisms are (1) cities are stable on millenial timescales, continuing to develop and attract wealth (2) geography is stable on millenial timescales, so the places where wealth-attracting cities tend to be located are the same then as now.
Contra (2), there has been a shift in importance of different transportation networks and energy sources. The roads discussed in the article are transportation network, but waterways historically have been even more important. And more recently rail networks as well. The shift from water to coal to grid-distributed electricity has loosened the connection of energy to geography.
> And also locations of 2000-year-old cities predicts locations of 2000-year old roads
The article claims the correlation is the opposite of what you stated—roads were built, and then cities built up around them. From the article:
> “Roman roads were often constructed in newly conquered areas without any extensive, or at least not comparable, existing network of cities and infrastructure,” Dalgaard and his colleagues write. In many instances, the roads came first. Settlements and cities came later.
The Romans were not unaware of principles on the siting and prospects of new settlements. See Vitruvius's De Architectura, or The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy by Alain Bresson:
As early as the fourth century BCE, ancient Greek city planning was very far advanced. When possible—that is, when a city was to be founded or refounded—the site was carefully chosen, taking into account first of all climatic conditions. Drawing on a tradition that goes back to the physician and hygienist Hippocrates and to Aristotle, and whose “intermediaries could only be the architects who built the Hellenistic cities,” the Roman architect Vitruvius recommended choosing a site where the temperature remained moderate and that was far from swamps, in order to avoid miasmas and fogs.
Then how about "Only 2,000 year old cities that were prosperous maintained their roads to survive until today"
> the Roman roads in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) weren’t maintained the same way they were in Europe...
> The correlation between ancient roadways and modern-day development so prevalent in Europe is much smaller and less significant for the Middle East and North Africa.
I wonder how much of that can be attributed to using camels to get around vs. horses & carts, with roads less necessary/helpful for commerce/transportation.
Most of North Africa and MENA's population centers are located near the coast or major navigable rivers (namely, the Nile). River and sea transport is much cheaper than land transport, even today. Why maintain a bunch of expensive roads when you can just have well developed waterborne trade?
The location for most major cities around the world is where there was a transition point between modes of transport. Sea <-> river, river <-> road, then later adding canals and rail into the mix. Where such transit points exist you are going to develop infrastructure for storing and re-packaging goods from one mode of transportation to another, which will lead to trade of the goods at these locations, which leads to more goods coming in to be traded, and round and round it goes.
Even with camel, roads are still helpfull to move around.
Yet roads were probably build through towns, which were created in geographically advantageous locations.
Most major historical cities are located near water of some kind (either a seaport or on a navigable river), so I find it hard to believe that roads were the driving force in determining where cities ended up.
But often it was rather some way of crossing the water that was that driving force. Oxford and Cambridge come to mind, or in Germany: Frankfurt (furt = ford), Erfurt, Saarbrücken (brücke = bridge).
If it was just about crossing water, you should also have random large cities in the middle of nowhere, but if you start looking at all the major cities of the world on a map, they’re almost all on a coast or a major river.
I thought that settling on a river is more for ease of access to a water supply than access to water as a mean of transportation. I may (surely) be wrong too.
I’m sure that’s a factor. But most of the largest cities in the world are specifically on the coast or on a large river very close to the coast. You can’t drink the water in the ocean, so that leaves trade as the main driver (by my reckoning, at least).
> You can’t drink the water in the ocean
Yes, that's why I wrote only about rivers, but I think a lot of the big coastal cities are built on an estuary too. My point was implementation on a river is not just for transportation, but also access to other benefits, like easy access to water. For coastal cities, they also have access to fishing (rivers can also give access to fish, but not the same amounts).
Yes they note that in some instances the roads preceded the cities. But when they do analysis there is no effort to seperate cases where the cities preceded the roads.
> (1) cities are stable on millenial timescales
Unless they are razed to the ground. But I agree that cities tend to stay on the same place.
Yes I love travelling to Babylon, or visiting the sites of Troy. And the trip to Machu Picchu is definitely worth it!
I know London and New York look like that will be around forever, but no city in the US is older than 600 years. We don’t have enough evidence to support that cities are stable on millennial timescales, since a few hundred years is enough for drastic change.
Cartago, Cartago Nova(Cartagena), Roma, some Egyptian cities, etc are far older. we are talking of two/three millenniums. But is true that some older cities disappeared, displaced by more modern cities, climate changes, geopolitical changes or recurrent races by frequent wars.
Indian cities like Patna have been around before Roman empire
> We don’t have enough evidence to support that cities are stable on millennial timescales
Some cities have existed for millenia, like Rome, but with ups and down. And drastic change can be even quicker than hundreds of years, for example a plague or a conflict will cause change quickly.
London is not a great counter-example because it has been a major settlement for at least a couple of millennia.
No it hasn't, Londinium was abandoned when the Romans vacated Great Britian.
The Roman settlement was, but London as a whole was only abandoned briefly if at all. There was a major Anglo-Saxon settlement outside the Roman walls in what is now Covent Gardens and the Strand definitely in the 6th century and possibly in the 5th. The Roman settlement started declining in population towards the beginning of the 5th century.
Maybe it's whole lot simpler and it's just things like rivers and terrain shape human habitation and economy patterns both now and 2000 years ago?
Bingo. I've been discussiing this on G+. In paarticular, adding topographic maps helps show transport logic pointedly ignored by the paper.
The areas may simply be more amenable to prosperity: good land, water, resources.
Roads were little used for transport. Goods moved by water. Rivers. Sea. Canals, mostly after 1500. Costs were 1/20th or less of overland drayage.
Transport routes are established between points of interest, and those develop according to potential. Several of the major roads follow coastlines or rivers. Others bridge river valleys, generally through other valleys and over passes.
The Roman empire itself grew into areas offering food, lumber, or other trade.
The paper's conclusion of causality is grossly premature and overstated.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/Fr...
http://floodmap.net/Elevation/ElevationMap/CountryMaps/?cz=F...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Topograp...
I've only had a quick skim but what worries me is that the authors are investigating a fundamentally geographic problem yet don't apparently have a background in GI science. For example, the authors use fixed grid cells for analysis, yet the modifiable areal unit problem states that varying the boundaries of your analysis can change the result, and especially given the coarseness of their chosen grid I'd like to see at least some attempt to handle this (perhaps repeat with smaller/shifted grid cells, compare results), or failing that at very least evidence of awareness of the problem. I've an MSc is GIS and one thing I learned is that even with the best data and methodology (PhD level spatial stats) it can be extremely difficult to establish statistical significance, and I'm not convinced here. I'd like to see a far more sophisticated treatment of the GI science methodologically before the leap into the historical/economic domain. I strongly suspect the geo side would fall apart under close analysis, thus undermining everything beyond that point.
More or less my take.
Misuse of statistics.
The images from the article distinctly show the roads and population centers which then shows the mountain ranges in "negative space."
(I agree with you, just pointing out another observation)
What about the negative result TFA found for the Middle East and Africa?
Topology and climate of both regions differs markedly. The significant population centres in both regions developed along their respective major river systems. Most especially the Nile, and Tigris-Euphrates.
Yep.
Reminds me of the old path dependency story about the dimensions of the Saturn booster rockets being determined by the official dimensions for Roman war chariots (and in turn, by the width of a horse's ass). The rockets were transported through tunnels by rail, which used a 4'8 gauge determined by the British, who supposedly based their standard gauge on the width of wheel ruts in their ancient roadways because they were more used to designing horses and carts. Except that the early railways used a range of gauges that were only later standardised, and tunnel widths would have been broadly similar even if they'd standardised on a slightly larger or smaller gauge because the real determining factor in early tunnel boring was to bore the smallest possible tunnel with a cylindrical cross section which could accommodate carriages in which passengers could stand...
And more importantly, the booster rockets were a fair bit smaller than the actual width of the tunnels they were transported through because rocket aerodynamics also favour small cylindrical cross sections. Even if there had never been people called Romans to specify war chariot widths or even creatures called horses, or the US had standardised on 7' gauge also widely used in early English railways, they'd probably have ended up the same size.
For spanish speakers interested in the subject, here is an interview with another member of the team, Pablo Selaya, about this research.
https://www.ivoox.com/principio-incertidumbre-calzadas-roman...
I would expect that the roads were built over existing trails, as those trails would likely be the most efficient routes between places. Not punched through virgin wilderness.
Romans had considerably more powerful engineering at their disposal, and placed a high priority on straightness. Punching through obstacles was pretty much a trademark practice for them: https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2786/4032626656_8e2fd14b1b_b.j...
It's an impressive picture. But punching through an obstacle that a trail winds around is not the same thing as punching through a virgin wilderness.
If only we knew why our feet walk the way they do.
How about the roads in the ancient middle east? How about the roads in current USA?
The image on that webpage suggests there were no Roman roads in Greece
Is this just a heatmap of population?
>How does military might factor in?
I don't think that sentence is grammatically correct.
The study does a poor job of explaining why there are so many roads in Turkey and most of the middle east, and yet such little development there. Such a stark contrast between western Europe and the Islamic world casts doubt on the idea that the roads played the dominant economic factor over the past two millennia.
"military might" is a noun phrase (adjective + noun), "factor in" is a verb phrase (verb + preposition). Hopefully this helps your parse.
Not a native speaker but shouln't it be "how might the military factor in"?
Here "might" is a noun meaning "strength", not the verb https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/might
It can even be replaced 1:1 with strength, so "How does military strength factor in?"
Differences weren't that stark before the industrial revolution, a boat that the Islamic world clearly missed for a number of reasons.
The other big factor is Suez. The channel basically killed Euro-Asian land routes that had been maintained for thousands of years.
"Military might" == "military strength".
Rewritten: how might one consider the strength of armies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)
The impact of the Mongol conquest almost cannot be overstated.