Saturday 25 November 2023

Roman Forts




I picked up out of casual interest, of course, an interesting paper last week. As the title suggests it is about Roman fortifications, this time in what is now Syria, Turkey, and northern Iraq.

Casana, J., Goodman, D., Ferwerda, C., ‘A wall or a road? A remote sensing-based investigation of fortifications on Rome's eastern frontier.’ Antiquity, 2023, 1-18.

The reference is a bit incomplete above, but the link should take you there. The paper is released under a common creative licence, so it is free (unlike a lot of academic journal stuff).

The paper, as the title suggests, is about finding a lot of Roman forts on the Empire’s eastern frontier. Or rather, to me, it undermines the idea of there being an eastern frontier in the first place. In the 1920s Jesuit French priest Father Antoine Poidebard conducted a series of ariel surveys over the region and detected a line of forts which he took to be along the military road set out under Diocletian. This, then, was Rome’s eastern frontier, erected to defend the Empire from the Persians and also from nomadic tribes.

Poidebard detected 116 fort structures, of various sizes from towers through small forts to larger ones of 100 meters square or more. The paper reports the results of a survey of the same region using declassified satellite imagery from the 1960s and 1970s, and they found a large number (396) of additional fortifications in the region. They also failed to find some of the originals, and suggest that increased agriculture and urban development have removed them from the archaeological record.

The structures, however, are not distributed along the frontier, but form a roughly east-west line along the desert margins, connecting Mosul on the Tigris River in the east to Aleppo in western Syria. This does not seem to be a defensive fortification system, nor one to protect a road. The authors hypothesise that the structures, while fortified, were, in fact, to provide secure resting places for merchants, messengers and military personnel travelling from east to west (and vice versa).

The paper suggests that the original survey suffered somewhat from bias, in that Poidebard hypothesised where the frontier road was and surveyed that bit, his results confirming the hypothesis. This is not to denigrate his achievement, of course, his was a pioneering study and ariel archaeology did not really get going in a methodical way until after World War Two. Nevertheless, the recent findings do suggest that a re-think of Roman frontiers might be needed. Such rethinks are not uncommon, of course. The nature and purpose of Hadrian’s Wall, for one, have been a matter of some puzzlement for decades. It does not seem to be a purely military installation either, but exactly what it was remains a little disputed. Similarly, I believe that Roman forts in Germany have been discovered far further east than it was thought the Romans ever penetrated. This too is a puzzle.

The authors suggest that the larger forts, at least, were constructed in the Third Century AD. Some of them, of course, were reused in medieval times but digging on the sites is rendered impossible for geopolitical reasons. Therefore good solid dating information is hard to come by, although the authors note that it is difficult at military sites anyway.

It seems possible that our picture of Roman frontiers, or at least some of them, have to change. The idea of legionaries looking out from behind walls at the unknown barbarian wasteland ahead of them, nervously fingering their pila, is clearly incorrect. I suspect that has been known for some time, but it is still the sort of trope we are fed by some parts of the media.

Instead, we have to consider the possibility that neither the Romans nor their neighbours really thought in terms of borders as we do. The frontier was, necessarily, porous. Merchants, at least, needed to cross them to bring luxury goods that the Empire did not produce, and export other things. Diplomats, similarly, needed to cross the frontier and all of these groups also needed places to stay along the way. In Britain the Romans erected mansios along the way, and these were sometimes accompanied by fortifications. Perhaps in Syria, where the population on the desert limit was low and water was in short supply, the staging posts were smaller and more concentrated in a fortified location.

Recent work, apparently, suggests that Roman forts were places of cultural exchange rather than confrontation. The authors suggest that these fortifications were places for travellers to rest, water themselves and their horses or camels, eat, and sleep. While they would have enabled the faster movement of troops to disputed zones within or beyond the fortified zone, their main function seems to have been to enable trade and communication between the Roman Empire and Persia.

As wargamers, of course, this is a bit frustrating. We like our ideas of legionaries marching out to pay the barbarians a lesson, be that in Syria, Germany, or Britain. The evidence, however, does not tend to support the view that cultural encounters were necessarily violent ones. While the military had a presence, they were, perhaps, more there as a sort of civil police rather than to impose the will of Rome on the locality. Unlike wargamers, the Romans were perhaps interested in trade rather than confrontation.

That does not mean that the Romans were unwilling to resort to force, of course. It does suggest that on the frontier there was less of a threat most of the time. It was only when tensions rose, locally or between the Empire and, say, Persia, that these installations became militarily useful, and they would have then secured the lines of communication for any army sent to and beyond the end of the road (as it were).

It is always possible, of course, that more discoveries will undermine even this theory. On the other hand, we do think that Magi from the East managed to arrive in Bethlehem reasonably quickly (within a year or two) from somewhere near Babylon. That does not suggest a heavily fortified and controlled frontier, even though it would make a better wargame.

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