From the river to the sea of the setting sun: route networks between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean during the Iron Age (1200-600 BCE)

Mariacarmela Montesanto

«Archeologia e Calcolatori» 2024, 35.1, 251-268; doi: 10.19282/ac.35.1.2024.17

Abstract

The study of ancient roads has been important in understanding political, social, and cultural transformations of ancient trade networks and economies. In the Near East, landscape-oriented research has immensely contributed to the analysis of pre-modern road systems. However, while for Roman and medieval periods this method produced a dataset that implemented the rich corpus of historical information, research on pre-Roman connectivity networks strongly relies on the archaeological record, mostly represented by data from surveys. The use of these data allows a long term and chronologically unprecise reconstruction of ancient itineraries. Therefore, gaps in the data are often filled by the transposition of later itineraries, risking reiterating the idea that road networks are static, stable over a very long period. This article aims to contextualise connecting networks and route landscapes from the Euphrates river to the Mediterranean sea during the Iron Age (1200-600 BCE). The study will make use of an integrated approach by using multiple datasets. The research will argue that by considering different data, it is possible to offer a critical interpretation of the main route network employed during the Iron Age to connect the Euphrates area with the sea.

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