The geospatial data for the Medieval road system in the Levant/Bilād al-Šām were collected in the context of the project ‘VIA-TARIQ: Analysing the long-term change and persistency of the Roman road system in the Levant’. The goal of the project was to 1) analyse the long-term development of the terrestrial transport network from the Roman to the Medieval period, 2) analyse the persistency of the Roman transport infrastructure (roads, stations, etc.) in the Medieval period. Dalgaard et al [1] previously claimed that there is little continuity between the Roman and modern road network in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, based on their analysis of Roman road network digitised from the Barrington Atlas [23] and Medieval caravan routes. Knowing the deficiencies of the datasets that Dalgaard et all used in their large-scale continental-wide analysis (low resolution and accuracy of the geospatial data, biases in data collection and publication of the Barrington Atlas, low representativity of the caravan routes for the complete Medieval road system, etc.) it was decided to take their conclusions as a starting point and to test the hypothesis stating there is low continuity between the Roman and the Medieval road network in the case of the Roman Near East. While the Roman road data were recently compiled and published, resulting in very high-resolution, spatially explicit and richly annotated dataset Itiner-e [45], until now there did not exist a comparable digital and openly accessible dataset for the Medieval (Early-Middle Islamic) road system in the MENA region. An exception is the al-Ṯurayyā Project [67], a digital version of Cornu’s atlas [8] of ‘classical’ Islamic sites and routes (9^th–10^th c. CE).

Therefore, in order to analyse the long-term development of the road network in the Near East and persistency of the Roman road network and its influence on the Medieval network this digital dataset was conceived. It was decided to apply similar methodology as was used to create Itiner-e by compiling available published historical (Medieval geographers, itineraries), epigraphic (milestones), and archaeological (settlements, road stations, bridges, forts, etc.) evidence to reconstruct the Medieval terrestrial transport network in Bilād al-Šām. This dataset is the first attempt to bring all this evidence together and reconstruct the Medieval road system in high spatial resolution and accuracy and to publish the geospatial data following FAIR and Open Science principles (Figure 1).

The spatial coverage of the dataset roughly corresponds to the traditional definition of Bilād al-Šām and ancient Greater Syria from Taurus Mountains in the north to the Red Sea in the south and between the Mediterranean Sea and the Euphrates. It covers contemporary Syria (west of the Euphrates), Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Palestinian territories, and parts of south-eastern Turkey and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Spatial extent (EPSG: 3395):

The dataset covers the Early and Middle Islamic periods in the Bilād al-Šām, ca. 650-1517 CE.

The road digitisation was made in three steps: a) road identification, b) road localization, c) road digitisation. Concurrently, sites associated with the road system (start and end points, road stations, bridges, forts, sanctuaries, settlements, and cities) were digitised using the same sequence of a) identification, b) localisation, c) digitisation.

In the first step, roads and sites were identified based on historical sources, previously published atlases, regional summaries, milestones, archaeological surveys, and excavations. The project principally relied on Dussaud [13] and Tabula Imperii Byzantini [14] for Syria and Northern Syria, Cornu’s atlas for the Early Islamic period [8], and Archaeological Survey of Israel and MEGA Jordan databases for the southern Levant (Israel/Palestine, Jordan). Umayyad and Abbasid milestones are known only from several roads south of Damascus, and most were published by Sharon in Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae (CIAP) [2728], which also includes building inscriptions of khāns. Road stations were collected first by Sauvaget [1627], and more recently by Cytryn-Silverman in Israel and Tavernari in all of Bilād al-Šām, who also provides a reconstruction of the road network in the Ayyubid-Mamluk period [1011]. Historical sources used cover mainly Early Islamic geographers in Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum (ibn Khurdhadhbih, Qudamah ibn Jafar, al-Maqdisi, ibn Hawqal, al-Istakhri) [29303132], Naser-e Khosraw for Middle Islamic period [33], and al-Umari and al-Qalqashandi for the Mamluk barīd [1934]. The selection of historical sources was limited by availability of the primary editions and works in translation. For the complete bibliography used for road and site identification, see the bibliography.md file in the dataset.

In the second step, the identified roads and sites were spatially located. This proved to be the most sensitive issue in the case of road localisation, as most of the sources used in step one are less concerned with recovering the actual course of the road in the landscape and focus more on routes (itineraries) without specifying topographic details of the road. Where possible, additional archaeological data were collected from archaeological and survey reports and databases such as the Archaeological Survey of Israel and MEGA Jordan to recover regional settlement patterns and propose the course of a road using settlement context. The information obtained from sources in step one was subsequently compared to various planimetric sources, such as modern and historical satellite imagery [3536] and topographical maps, e.g., Survey of Western Palestine [37], Carte du Liban [38], Karte des Ostjordanlandes [39], Karte von Kleinasien [40], French and British maps in 1:50,000, 1:100,000, and 1:200,000 scale [414243], and 1:100,000 maps of Turkey [44].

In step three, each road segment and site were manually digitised following spatial localisation suggested or recovered in step two in a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) platform and stored as a single data record in a vector layer with an associated attribute table. The digitised road sections follow a line connecting known sites associated with a route (settlements, milestones, bridges, road stations, etc.). The digitised paths of such segments are refined by comparing them to existing contemporary and historical roads on georeferenced topographic maps and satellite imagery. The digitised reconstructed segment aims to consider local topography and conform its course to local obstacles (wetlands, rugged terrain, etc.). In many cases, thus ‘conjectured’ road follows a modern or historical road where additional archaeological and historical data are missing. As a rule, if the start and end points of a road remain the same between periods and no other variables are known to influence the course of the road, the road segments are not changed between the periods. This method was applied to the Early Islamic period using the Itiner-e dataset and subsequently to the following periods (i.e., Early Islamic to Middle Islamic etc.). Summary statistics of the total road length and number of sites is in Table 3.

Geodesic length of each road segment in meters was calculated using the WGS84/World Mercator (EPSG: 3395) coordinate system and stored as an attribute.

Topological consistency of the road segments was checked to ensure that: a) the lines do not self-intersect, b) do not self-overlap, c) all road segments are split at intersections with other road segments or where they intersect with points in _sites datasets.

The main constraints of the dataset are related to the accuracy and spatial resolution of the location of roads and road related sites in the archaeological literature. Archaeological Survey of Israel and MEGA Jordan are geospatial databases, and the accuracy of the representative points of archaeological sites is usually good. In other instances, the information obtained from publications was cross-checked with available satellite imagery and topographic maps to locate the reported archaeological remains. Segment certainty field is used to store information about the spatial accuracy of the road data.

Chronological information is often missing in the _sites datasets, as it was not always possible to establish approximate start and end dates of each site based on the available literature, besides general attribution to a certain period. Missing values are recorded as ‘9999’ in the database.

The dataset consists of separate road and site files for each sub-period following the chronological scheme defined above in (2) Methods section using this naming convention: period_name_roads or period_name_sites. bibliography.md file contains the complete bibliography used for creation of the dataset. readme.md file contains a brief summary and description of the dataset.

Digitised roads are stored as vector polylines (ESRI Shapefile) or as a FeatureCollection with LineString geometries (GeoJSON). Digitised sites are represented as points and stored as vector points (ESRI Shapefile) or as a FeatureCollection with Point geometries (GeoJSON). All geospatial data is in the projected coordinate system WGS84/World Mercator (EPSG: 3395).

Each road segment and site is treated as a single record (row in the database) in the geospatial database with associated variables stored in the attribute table. The attribute table is structured to hold basic descriptors of each road segment and site, such as unique identifiers, typology, information related to spatial accuracy and certainty, chronological, historical, and bibliographical information, and creator of each record.

Data structure of _roads files is described in Table 4. Data structure of _sites files is described in Table 5.

bibliography.md (Markdown file) is divided into sections “Sources”, “Roads”, “Sites”, and “Other” (i.e., publications consulted during the creation of the dataset but not directly used in data collection and compilation).

readme.md (Markdown file) contains information about the creator, license, and data structure with a brief summary of the dataset.

.shp; .geojson; .md

Between September 2025 and June 2026.

Adam Pažout designed the database and collected the data.

English

CC-BY 4.0 International

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21904951

12/08/2026