Two thousand years ago, someone scratched a web of lines into stone in a Roman settlement on the empire’s northern edge. Soldiers, traders, or locals passing time in Coriovallum, now Heerlen in the Netherlands, moved small counters across those lines in a tactical duel of blockade and entrapment.

The board survived but the rules did not. Now researchers believe they have them using artificial intelligence.

By simulating thousands of possible turn sequences on the carved network found at the site, archaeologists identified a ruleset that best matches the wear patterns on the stone: a two-player blocking game they’ve named Ludus Coriovalli, the Game of Coriovallum.

It belongs to the Roman family of line-movement strategy games that includes ludus latrunculorum, but with its own geometry and tempo.

For Green Prophet readers, this is familiar territory.

We’ve previously explored ancient games reborn from archaeology, from Mehen boards etched into ship planks to Egyptian Senet sets reconstructed from tomb art. These games are more than pastime, they’re ancient culture, revealing how people thought about territory, risk, and control.

Ludus Coriovalli adds a Roman frontier voice to that conversation.

What are the proposed rules of the game?

Two players use unequal numbers of pieces on a network of intersecting lines, with the larger force attempting to surround and immobilize the smaller force. Players take turns moving one piece at a time along the engraved lines to an adjacent intersection point. A piece (or group) is captured or neutralized when it is completely blocked so it cannot move along any connecting line. The larger side wins by trapping all opposing pieces, while the smaller side wins by evading capture or escaping the blockade.

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Two thousand years ago, all roads led to Rome. Now, thanks to modern data science, they finally do again — this time in high resolution. A newly released digital atlas Itiner-e what they call a “Google Maps for Roman roads.”It is being hailed as a kind of “Google Maps for the ancient world”, charting nearly 300,000 kilometres of Roman roads across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. The project stitches together countless archaeological and historical datasets into a single interactive network, revealing the sheer scale of the viae Romanae that once bound the empire together.

At its peak around AD 150, the Roman Empire stretched from Britain’s Hadrian’s Wall to the banks of the Euphrates, from the Atlas Mountains to the Black Sea. Its lifeblood was the road — engineered with stone, gravel, and astonishing precision — that carried soldiers, grain, ideas, and empire itself. But despite centuries of scholarship and excavation, our understanding of this network has remained incomplete.

Although the roads are one of the best-known aspects of Roman history, it’s surprising how many details about them we still don’t know. According to the new dataset, the locations of only 3% of Roman roads are known with certainty; the rest have been inferred from satellite imagery, topographical analysis, and fragmentary archaeological evidence.

The map, created through a collaboration of classicists, GIS specialists, and open-data archivists, pulls together previously siloed regional studies — from Britain’s Watling Street to Israel’s Via Maris — into a single digital ecosystem. Each route can be explored interactively, complete with estimated construction dates, trade significance, and terrain context.

For ordinary viewers, it’s a revelation — a chance to visualize how Rome’s engineers carve through deserts, mountains, and marshes to keep an empire alive. It is, quite literally, the skeleton of Western civilization rendered as pixels and coordinates.

But this project isn’t just a nostalgic look backward. It’s also a powerful reminder of what sustainable infrastructure once meant. Roman roads were built to last millennia, with local materials, drainage systems, and low-maintenance stonework that endured centuries of weather and war. Many of today’s highways and rail lines still trace their original foundations. Roman concrete was self-healing and lasts until today.

In an age of asphalt sprawl, potholes, and short-term urban planning, the Roman network offers a strange kind of hope for our future. Ancient engineers designed for permanence and adaptation — concepts that modern infrastructure often neglects. The Romans understood maintenance as a civic duty, with roads meant to connect people, not just move things.

Roman law (Lex Julia Municipalis, 45 BCE) required local communities and landowners to maintain the sections of road passing through their territory. Public funds (the cursus publicus) supported major arteries, showing that upkeep was embedded in governance.

Some sustainability researchers see parallels between the Roman viae and today’s green corridors: both seek to balance movement, resilience, and local ecology.

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AI deciphers the text of 2,000-year-old charred papyrus scripts, unveiling musings on music and capers.

Student researchers have used machine learning to read text hidden inside charred, unopenable scrolls from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum. The charred scroll was buried 2,000 years ago by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

The newly revealed passages, using software and scanning called virtual unwrapping, discuss sources of pleasure including music, the colour purple and the taste of capers. The team trained an algorithm on tiny differences in texture where the ink had been, based on three-dimensional computed tomography scans of the scrolls.

The scroll is one of hundreds of intact papyri excavated in the eighteenth century from a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum, Italy. These lumps of carbonized ash — known as the Herculaneum scrolls — are the only library that survives from the ancient world, but are too fragile to open.

The winning entry, announced on 5 February, reveals hundreds of words across more than 15 columns of text, corresponding to around 5% of an entire scroll. “The contest has cleared the air on all the people saying will this even work,” says Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, and co-founder of the prize. “Nobody doubts that anymore.”

Luke Farritor, an undergraduate studying computer science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, used the crackle to train a machine-learning algorithm, revealing the word porphyras, ‘purple’, which won him the prize for unveiling the first letters in late October. An Egyptian PhD student in Berlin, Youssef Nader, who followed with even clearer images of the text, came second.

The content of most of the previously opened Herculaneum scrolls relates to the Epicurean school of philosophy, and seems to have formed the working library of a follower of the Athenian philosopher Epicurus, who lived from 341 to 270 BC, named Philodemus.

The new text revealed in the contest doesn’t name the author but, from a rough first read, researchers predict it is by Philodemus. As well as pleasurable tastes and sights, the scroll includes a figure called Xenophantus, possibly a flute-player of that name mentioned by the ancient authors Seneca and Plutarch, whose evocative playing apparently caused Alexander the Great to reach for his weapons.

Researcher Seales has been trying to read these concealed texts for nearly 20 years. His team developed software to “virtually unwrap” the surfaces of rolled-up papyri using three-dimensional computed tomography (CT) images. In 2019, he carried two of the scrolls from the Institut de France in Paris to the Diamond Light Source particle accelerator near Oxford to make high-resolution scans.

Seales team read Dead Sea scrolls from the Ein Gedi region in Israel. The Dead Sea Scrolls, also called the Qumran Caves Scrolls, are a set of ancient Jewish manuscripts from the Second Temple period. They were discovered over a period of 10 years, between 1946 and 1956, at the Qumran Caves near Ein Feshkha on the northern shore of the Dead Sea, Israel.

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The relations between the Herodian Kingdom and the Nabatean Kingdom were very complex and involved political, economic and marriage ties. Through the institution of marriage with local dynasties, Herodians consolidated power in the southern Levant and later became Rome’s client state.

Intermarriage between religious groups was not uncommon, people were open-minded, until they were not. Here’s a little history of the way things were in the Levant, where major world religions brewed and fed each other:

The most prominent ruler of the dynasty, Herod the Great who ruled from 74/73 BCE to 4 CE, was a controversial figure according to historical sources, and one of main villains of The New Testament.

However, despite the popular tradition his rule was characterized by colossal buildings in Judea, including a renovation of the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, construction of the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, the fortress Masada on the eastern edge of the Judean Desert, the maritime port Caesarea Maritima, and monumental palaces like Herodium, 10 miles south of Jerusalem, and Machaerus, 18 miles southeast from the mouth of the Jordan River.

Although his father Antipater I Idumaean (100 BCE to 43 BCE) was an Edomite and his mother Cypros I, a Nabataean, Herod was raised as a Jew. How about that?

An ancient matchmaker

Herod used marriage to bring together different ethnic groups within his realm and making political alliances with other rulers in the same area. In the First Century BCE many members of the Judean elites were Hellenized, which was also the case with Herodians. The process of Hellenization enabled these elites to consolidate and expand their rule in the southern Levant.

The founder of the dynasty, Antipater I already designed a marriage strategy to boost his influence in the region and took a Nabataean noblewoman Cypros I as a wife. She was related to the Nabataean King Aretas III, also known as Philhellen which means Friend of the Greeks.

Kings as babysitters

Relations between them became so cordial that Antipater I would entrust the Nabataean king to take care of his sons while he was participating in the military campaigns against Hasmonean Aristobulus II (66 BC-63 BC).

According to Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian (37 CE to 100 CE), Antipater I used the Nabataean backing to contact Pompey and Roman generals in the east. Then Antipater I forged an alliance with Caesar, and for his ongoing support of Rome he was awarded with the prize of not having to pay taxes. 

His ascendants automatically became the Roman citizens, therefore his marriage to Cyprus I is only one aspect of a much broader policy that sees Antipater I taking advantage of multiple social, religious and ethnic identities.

However, political relations were not always idyllic: when Cesar was assassinated in Rome in 44 CE the East entered a period of chaos and the Nabataeans mistakenly sided with the Parthians. After the Romans defeated the Parthians, the Nabataean Kingdom was obliged to pay tribute to Romans.

The Roman state used Herod I to punish the Nabataeans when they failed to pay the tribute on time and in 36 BCE Herod I expanded his realm at the expense of the Nabataean Kingdom taking its northern swaths. Wadi Mujib, the biblical Arnon Stream, was a border between Nabataean and Herodian states and, according to a Greek archaeologist Konstantinos Politis, the late researcher Taysir Atiat found a Nabataean temple and a watch tower on the mouth of Wadi Mujib.

Within a Herodian Kingdom there was a port on the eastern side of the Dead Sea called Ain –ez Zara, with rooms for shops as it was part of the incense trade route. Further up an ancient road connects Ain ez-Zara with Machareus fortress, a border stronghold and a palace of King Herod the Great. It was a part of the defensive line with a small settlement under the palace, which was a place where St. John the Baptist was beheaded around 29 CE.

A breakup that leads to war

Herod Antipas (20 BCE to 39 CE) was one of sons of Herod the Great and ruled the Galilee and Perea, where in the former province established a city of Tiberius named after his patron Emperor Tiberius. Continuing practice of his predecessors, he married Phasaelis, a daughter of the Nabataean King Aretas IV. The breakup of that marriage was a pretext for the war between Aretas IV and Herod Antipas as the former invaded Perea and defeated Antipas.

According to Josephus, Jews attributed the defeat of Herod Antipas in 36 CE to the beheading of John the Baptist.

A few generations earlier, the romantic relation took place between Salome, the sister of Herod I, and the Nabataean vizier Syllaeus, who came to Jerusalem in 20 BCE to negotiate a loan of 60 talents on the behalf of the Nabataean King Obodas III.

Afraid of the pagans at Petra

Despite the objections from Herod the Great, his sister continued to date the ambitious Nabataean deputy.  Herod I had tense relations with Obodas III and paranoid, as he was, Herod I thought that Syllaeus would depose him and become the ruler of Judea. Several months later, when Syllaeus returned to Jerusalem to propose to Salome, Herod I added the condition that he had to become a Jew and undergo circumcision.

Fearing the reaction and potential stoning by his fellow pagans in Petra, Syllaeus backed off returning to the Nabataean capital empty handed, without love.

The identity of the Herodians was fluid and dynamic, transforming from one ethnicity, culture and religion to another. The choice of the spouse or partner depended on the constellation of power and relations with the Nabataean kings who were also politically submissive to the Romans.

When Jews rebelled in 70 CE, the Nabataeans joined the Roman army who crashed the uprising. However, the Nabataeans’ relative independence didn’t last for too long and Emperor Trajan annexed their kingdom in 106 CErenaming it in the province Arabia Petrea.

The post If you think the Middle East is dramatic now, 2000 years ago it was a telenovela appeared first on Green Prophet.

It’s not just ancient Roman baths being uncovered in Jerusalem this week. The Israel Antiquities Authorities are reporting a Roman-era dog’s paw print among its finds. Says Dr. Ofer Sion, excavation director in the Old City of Jerusalem: “Another interesting discovery that caused excitement during the excavation is the paw print of a dog that probably belonged to one of the soldiers. The paw print was impressed on the symbol of the legion on one of the roof tiles and it could have happened accidentally or have been intended as a joke.”

Excavations started before the construction of a Jewish mikveh, ritual bath, began. The Roman ruins have been dated to 1,800 years ago and it is believed to be a bath used by the Tenth Legion. These were the Roman soldiers who destroyed the Jewish Temple.

The discovery of the ancient bath, and paw prints!, puts new light on the Aelia Capitolina, the Roman city founded on the Second Temple period ruins of Jerusalem. It is Aelia Capitolina that defines the character of the Old City of Jerusalem as we know it today.

Just shows that man’s best friend has been around for some time.

Read more on green archeology:
Deep Oil Drilling Threatens Archeology
Dam to Drown Ancient Turkish City
Gas Line Excavation Unearths Cultic Vessels

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