ABSTRACT
The historian of engineering, when he turns his attention to roads, is immediately faced with a problem: of all the societies in western Asia and Europe, from Antiquity until the nineteenth century, only the Romans set out to build a carefully planned road system, with properly metalled and drained surfaces. Many sections of Roman roads still exist and the methods of construction can be determined by properly controlled excavations. Moreover, from a combination of literary and archaeological sources it is possible to build up a fairly comprehensive picture of the road systems throughout the Empire. There is therefore sufficient material to enable books to be written on Roman roads, covering all aspects, including the purely technical. Other societies did not have roads in this sense, or very few, but they did have communications. In Islam, for example, where a feeling of cultural identity was fostered by a common religion and the widespread use of Arabic, travel from one province to another — by government officials, merchants, pilgrims and scholars — was a commonplace. Roads were largely unnecessary, partly because of the terrain, and partly because of the universal use of animals, above all the camel, for overland travel and transport of merchandise. They had routes, rather than roads; routes that were recorded and mapped, provided with caravanserais, guard houses, postal stations and water supplies. To concentrate upon the purely technical aspects of roadbuilding, would inevitably leave the impression that only the Romans paid serious attention to communications, an impression that is demonstrably false. In this chapter alone, therefore, I have disregarded my intention of dealing mainly with technical matters, in order to say something about communications in general. For the reasons just given, the discussion of techniques will be found mainly in the section on Roman roads.
