01-19-2016, 11:27 AM
Part of the problem, I think, is that the boundaries were quite fluid - even in those cases when we have a decent idea of where they were, they changed a great deal over the centuries. Towns and rivers, on the other hand, tend to stay in the same place! (although the names changed...)
So a digital map like this, which gives a lot of detail of geographical features, would struggle to represent the complexity of political or administrative borders over time, unless it was fixed at a single date (AD100, for example), which would limit its usefulness.
There are, of course, plenty of 'traditional' maps online which attempt to show such borders - this one of (republican?) northern Italy/Gaul, for example, or this one of the empire under Theodosius. It may be that in future we'll have more interactive mapping tools which could allow for fluctuations over time, and the uncertainties of guesswork, but for now we have to rely on a combination of old and new!
So a digital map like this, which gives a lot of detail of geographical features, would struggle to represent the complexity of political or administrative borders over time, unless it was fixed at a single date (AD100, for example), which would limit its usefulness.
There are, of course, plenty of 'traditional' maps online which attempt to show such borders - this one of (republican?) northern Italy/Gaul, for example, or this one of the empire under Theodosius. It may be that in future we'll have more interactive mapping tools which could allow for fluctuations over time, and the uncertainties of guesswork, but for now we have to rely on a combination of old and new!
Nathan Ross
