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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Unless they are razed to the ground. But I agree that cities tend to stay on the same place.
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.
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 agree with you, just pointing out another observation)
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.
https://www.ivoox.com/principio-incertidumbre-calzadas-roman...
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.
The other big factor is Suez. The channel basically killed Euro-Asian land routes that had been maintained for thousands of years.
Rewritten: how might one consider the strength of armies?
The impact of the Mongol conquest almost cannot be overstated.
