An international study of nearly 299,000 kilometres of Roman roads has found that several cities, including ancient Byzantium and Ancyra, today's Istanbul and Ankara, were more central to the overland network than Rome itself.
Published in Nature Communications, the study used network science to map how the empire's roads connected people. Antioch, today's Antakya, and Corinth in Greece also outranked Rome as connecting points. Istanbul linked traffic between Europe and Asia, while Ankara, in the heart of Anatolia, organised east-west travel across the peninsula.
Co-author Tom Brughmans of Aarhus University said the roads spread not just people but information, ideas and beliefs. The saying that all roads lead to Rome, he noted, dates from the Middle Ages and was symbolic. Some routes laid out about 2,000 years ago still shape transport across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
