Roads in the sand. Travelers data contribution for reconstructing the road networks of the ancient Eastern desert of Egypt

Launched in November 2017, the ERC funded ‘Desert Networks’ project aims to work for the first time in and on the Eastern Desert of Egypt as a dynamic object, and to analyse the nature and function of the different networks that linked its various component parts over time, from the New Kingdom to the end of the Roman period (ca 1500 BC- ca 300 AD). Three main networks are considered: physical, economic and social. The team's work has been particularly focused on the reconstruction of the layout of the ancient roads and their equipment over time, based on the study of ancient sources (textual and archaeological) but also on the detailed analysis of the geography of the region and field observations. Among these sources, about 60 travelers’ accounts from the 17th to early 20th c. AD (from Bruce to Floyer, and Belzoni to Linant de Bellefonds) were analyzed and several routes were fully reconstructed, which allowed to determine the location of the passes used by the expeditions and the main criteria taken into account to choose the routes. With a DEM (Digital Elevation Model), these data and the location of archaeological remains are used to calibrate a least cost path analysis to reconstruct the ancient paths. The paper will discuss the insertion of the empirical data, extracted from the traveler’s accounts, in the model that will be used to reconstruct the ancient paths, and its interest to refine the model.