This map is a comprehensive wall map of the Empire in the mid-2nd century AD (specifically in AD 160), when the Roman Empire stretched from the Antonine Wall in Britannia in the north to Dodecaschoenus in Aegyptus in the south.

Mapping the Frontiers of Rome

Drawing an accurate representation of the borders of the Roman Empire in the mid-2nd century AD at a 1:6,000,000 scale was an unexpected challenge in the creation of this map. My primary source was the shapefile provided by the Ancient World Mapping Center, however due to my own knowledge of Ancient Rome, I quickly noticed some blatant inaccuracies in areas like Germania, Dacia, and Africa. With many maps of the Roman Empire created by other cartographers seemingly depicting the same mistakes, I was forced to come up with a more accurate Roman border using other sources.

My first step was mapping areas of the Roman border that follow natural borders, such a river or mountain range. For example, much of the Roman border in Europe follows the Rhine and Danube Rivers, allowing me to easily decipher where the Roman border was in these places. The shapefile for these rivers were also provided by the Ancient World Mapping Center and were based off the Barrington Atlas.

My next step following this was to use a different dataset provided by the Ancient World Mapping Center. Titled ‘Pleiades’, this dataset contains georeferenced locations for every place recorded in the Barrington Atlas. Most useful of the places recorded by this dataset were the forts. Providing an obvious defence against intruders, Romans built forts extensively across their border, so by ‘connecting-the-dots’ I was able to discover where the Roman border existed.

​​​​​​​In areas in this methodology failed due to a lack of forts and natural boundaries (such as Rome’s borders in modern-day Algeria and modern-day Syria), I researched the correct border extensively using a variety of sources, but primarily the Atlas of Classical History.

The Limes Tripolitanus were expanded by at the close of the 2nd century AD under Septimius Severus. Therefore, before this the border would have been smaller and based around several defensive forts with its greatest extent at Lambaesis, established between AD 123-129.

Though briefly conquered in AD 114, the city of Dura-Europos only came under Roman control in AD 165. Prior to this, the border likely followed a series of forts west of this, heading from south to north until it reaches a natural border, the Euphrates River.

Toponyms and Symbology

I consulted several other sources to determine toponyms for other features both inside and surrounding the Empire. Most useful to me was the Atlas of Classical History, which featured a plethora of maps of specific regions of the Empire in the 2nd century AD and the area surrounding it and included contemporary names for several features, including tribes, regions, and rivers.

For more detailed maps at a larger scale, I referred to the Atlas of the Greek and Roman World in Antiquity.

I also frequently referred to the Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Rome to find toponyms for some areas. This atlas, though its maps are at a smaller scale than I would have liked, shows ancient toponyms for various parts of the Empire that had not been covered by my other sources.

To save space and to show how Romans would have referred to their own Empire, labels (except with cities) are labelled exclusively with their ancient toponym.

I collected information regarding cities in the Roman Empire from a dataset compiled by Jack Hanson, hosted on the Oxford Roman Economy Project website. This dataset, based upon the Barrington Atlas, provided both ancient and modern toponyms for sites with urban characteristics within the Roman Empire between 100 BC and AD 300.  I labelled all towns with the ancient toponym first to accurately show how the inhabitants of the cities in the mid-2nd century would have known them, though I included the modern toponyms in brackets (and a smaller font size and lighter font colour) to help the modern map reader find their way around the Empire using familiar placenames.

Also included in this dataset were ‘ranks’ of importance assigned to each city based upon how important the Barrington Atlas deemed each place to be. The hierarchical symbology I designed for cities on this map reflects the city’s rank in the dataset to ensure the more important cities in the Empire easily stand out from the rest.

Rome’s Neighbours

The aforementioned datasets based upon the Barrington Atlas covered only the Roman Empire and its frontiers. Therefore, when mapping the polities surrounding the Roman Empire, I consulted various other sources. Armenia: A Historical Atlas helped me greatly in mapping Armenia and the Near East. Mapping the Bosporan Kingdom was much more difficult; it had no defined boundaries like the other states. I relied on journal articles from classicists, some of which contained maps of the region. Other articles discuss Roman territory on the Black Sea (Tyras and Olbia). The location of Berenice and evidence of Roman control of the port is also from a journal article.

Shaded Relief

The topographical data used to create this map’s shaded relief is derived from SRTM tiles that were merged, reprojected to EPSG:3034, and resampled in QGIS. I used QGIS to render this shaded relief as a hillshade and exported the relief as a PNG. I then imported the image into Photoshop and removed the gradient’s mid-tones using a curves layer mask. The final shaded relief, exported as a PNG image, was embedded the project’s Illustrator file. A subtle Gaussian blur was applied to the relief in Illustrator to allow fine text to stand out on top of the relief.

The purpose of this shaded relief is to convey mountainous terrain that hindered Roman communications and formed many of the provincial boundaries within the Empire.

Coastline

The coastlines, rivers and lakes, and roads this map features were provided by the Ancient World Mapping Center, derived from the Barington Atlas. These datasets are modified from their original counterparts of Vmap0, a public domain product of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.The aforementioned dataset was limited to the ancient Mediterranean world and Western Europe, so I used Natural Earth’s river and lakes dataset to map rivers in areas that were not covered by the Ancient World Mapping Center dataset, such as modern-day Ukraine and modern-day Russia.

Bibliography

Ancient World Mapping Center, ‘All Rivers’, Ancient World Mapping Center <https://awmc.unc.edu/wordpress/map-files/> [accessed 10 August 2020]

Ancient World Mapping Center, ‘BA Roads’, Ancient World Mapping Center <https://awmc.unc.edu/wordpress/map-files/> [accessed 10 August 2020]

Ancient World Mapping Center, ‘Canals’, Ancient World Mapping Center <https://awmc.unc.edu/wordpress/map-files/> [accessed 10 August 2020]

Ancient World Mapping Center, ‘Coastline’, Ancient World Mapping Center <https://awmc.unc.edu/wordpress/map-files/> [accessed 10 August 2020]

Ancient World Mapping Center, ‘Inland Water’, Ancient World Mapping Center <https://awmc.unc.edu/wordpress/map-files/> [accessed 10 August 2020]

Ancient World Mapping Center, ‘Pleiades’, Ancient World Mapping Center <https://awmc.unc.edu/wordpress/map-files/> [accessed 10 August 2020]

Ancient World Mapping Center, ‘Roman Empire AD 200 Provinces’, Ancient World Mapping Center <https://awmc.unc.edu/wordpress/map-files/> [accessed 10 August 2020]

Ancient World Mapping Center, ‘Walls’, Ancient World Mapping Center <https://awmc.unc.edu/wordpress/map-files/> [accessed 10 August 2020]

Braund, David, ‘Theatre and Performance in the Bosporan Kingdom’, in Ancient Theatre and Performance Culture Around the Black Sea, ed. David Braund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 82-105

Brewer, Cynthia A, ‘7-class Set1’, ColorBrewer: Color Advice for Maps <http://www.ColorBrewer2.org> [accessed 17 May 2020]

GEBCO Compilation Group, ‘GEBCO 2019 Grid’, Gridded Bathymetry Data <https://www.gebco.net/data_and_products/gridded_bathymetry_data/> [accessed 5 March 2020]

Hammond, Nicholas G.L., Atlas of the Greek and Roman World in Antiquity (Park Ridge, New Jersey: Noyes Press, 1981)

Hanson, J.W., ‘Cities Database (OXREP databases) Version 1.0’, The Oxford Roman Economy Project <http://oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/databases/cities/> [accessed 17 August 2020]

Hanson, J.W., An Urban Geography of the Roman World, 100 B.C. to A.D. 300 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2016)

Hewsen, Robert H., Armenia: A Historical Atlas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001)

Jarvis, H.I.A, Reuter, A. Nelson, Guevara, E, ‘Hole-filled seamless SRTM data V4’, International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) <http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/> [accessed 22 September 2020]

Meredith, David, ‘Berenice Troglodytica’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 43 (1957), pp. 56-70

Minns, Ellis, ‘Olbia (Euxine)’, in Encylopædia Britannica, ed. Hugh Chisholm, 11th edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica/Olbia_(Euxine)> [accessed 21 October 2020]

Minns, Ellis, ‘Tyras’, in Encylopædia Britannica, ed. Hugh Chisholm, 11th edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica/Tyras> [accessed 21 October 2020]

Rostovtzeff, Michael Ivanovitch, The Excavations at Dura-Europos, 3 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)

Scarre, Chris, The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Rome (London: Penguin Group, 1995)

Stillwell, Richard, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976) <http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0006%3Aalphabetic+letter%3DL%3Aentry+group%3D1%3Aentry%3Dlambaesis> [accessed 15 August 2020]

Talbert, Richard J.A. and Bagnall, Roger S., Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000)

Talbert, Richard J.A., Atlas of Classical History (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 1989)

Wacher, J.S., The Roman World, 2 vols. (Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 2002)