Economic complexity of the Roman Empire

About

Project exploring the economic complexity of the Roman Empire on the basis of mentions of occupations on Latin inscriptions.

Authors

• Matteo Mazzamurro , PSNP, Aarhus University
• Petra Hemnkov , PSNP, Aarhus University
• Michele Coscia , IT University of Copenhagen
• Tom Brughmans , PSNP, Aarhus University

Funding

This research was conducted within the framework of the Past Social Networks Project (2023-2026), funded by The Carlsberg Foundations Young Researcher Fellowship (CF21-0382). This work was supported by a research grant (VIL57402) from VILLUM FONDEN.

License

CC-BY-SA 4.0, see attached License.md

Data

1. The Latin Inscriptions in Space and Time (LIST)
2. aggregate of the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg (https://edh.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/); aggregated EDH on Zenodo and Epigraphic Database Clauss Slaby (http://www.manfredclauss.de/); aggregated EDCS on Zenodo epigraphic datasets created by the Social Dynamics in the Ancient Mediterranean Project (SDAM), 2019-2023, funded by the Aarhus University Forskningsfond Starting grant no. AUFF-E-2018-7-2.
3. consists of 525,870 inscriptions, enriched by 65 attributes. 77,091 inscriptions are overlapping between the two source datasets (i.e. EDH and EDCS); 3,316 inscriptions are exclusively from EDH; 445,463 inscriptions are exclusively from EDCS. 511,973 inscriptions have valid geospatial coordinates (the geometry attribute). 206,570 inscriptions have a numerical date of origin expressed using an interval or singular year using the attributes notbefore and notafter. The dataset also employs a machine learning model to classify the inscriptions covered exclusively by EDCS in terms of 22 categories employed by EDH, see Kae, Hemnkov, Sobotkova 2021.
4. Citation: Kae, V., Hemnkov, P., & Sobotkov, A. (2023). LIST (v1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8431323 and Kae, V., Hemnkov, P., & Sobotkov, A. (2024). LIST (v1.2) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10473706

NOTE: users can generate their own datasets from raw data, or they can access the necessary epigraphic data to run these scripts via ScienceData.dk.

1. Geographic units data to compute economic complexity
2. Modern countries: download from https://public.opendatasoft.com/api/explore/v2.1/catalog/datasets/world-administrative-boundaries/exports/shp
3. Roman provinces: The shapefile of Roman provinces in 200 CE (peak Roman Empire under the Severan dynasty) is based on 'roman-empire-ce-200-provinces.geojson' published by The Ancient World Mapping Centre and corrected by Adam Pazout in 2023. https://github.com/AWMC/geodata/tree/master/Cultural-Data/politicalshading/romanempirece200_provinces

4. Pleaides regions: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pelagios/magis-pleiades-regions/main/pleiades-regions-magis-pelagios.geojson

5. Dataset of ancient cities

6. Hanson J. W., An urban geography of the Roman world, 100 BC to AD 300. Oxford: Archaeopress; 2016. http://oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/oxrep/docs/Hanson2016/Hanson2016_Cities_OxREP.csv

7. Hanson J. W, Ortman S. G., A systematic method for estimating the populations of Greek and Roman settlements. J Roman Archaeol. 2017;30: 301324.

8. Dataset of occupations Compiled by Petra Hemnkov in 2022, based on:

9. Waltzing JP. tude historique sur les corporations professionnelles chez les Romains depuis les origines jusqu la chute de lEmpire dOccident. Louvain: C. Peeters; 1895.

10. Petrikovits H v. Die Spezialisierung des rmischen Handwerks. Handw Vor- Frhgesch Zeit 1 Hist Rechtshistorische Beitr Untersuchungen Zur Frhgesch Gilde Ber ber Kolloquien Komm Fr Altertumskunde Mittel- Nordeur Den Jahren 1977 Bis 1980. 1981; 63132.

11. Harris EM. Workshop, Marketplace and Household: The Nature of Technical Specialization in Classical Athens and its Influence on Economy and Society. In: Carledge P, Cohen EE, Foxhall L, editors. Money, Labour and Land: Approaches to the Economy of Ancient Greece. LondonNew York: Routledge; 2001. pp. 6799.

12. van Leeuwen MHD, Maas I, Miles A. HISCO: Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations. 2022 2002 [cited 27 Jan 2022]. Available: https://historyofwork.iisg.nl/

13. Supplementary epigraphic dataset: The Greek Inscriptions in Space and Time (GIST)

14. represents a comprehensive collection of ancient Greek inscriptions, enriched by temporal and spatial metadata. The dataset was created by the Social Dynamics in the Ancient Mediterranean Project (SDAM), 2019-2023, funded by the Aarhus University Forskningsfond Starting grant no. AUFF-E-2018-7-2.

15. mainly based on Greek inscriptions from the dataset of Searchable Greek Inscriptions PHI and I.PHI dataset published by the Pythia Project Sommerschield, T., Assael, Y., Shillingford, B., Bordbar, M., Pavlopoulos, J., Chatzipanagiotou, M., Androutsopoulos, I., Prag, J., & de Freitas, N. (2021). I.PHI dataset: Ancient Greek inscriptions. https://github.com/sommerschield/iphi. The individual inscriptions have been cleaned, preprocessed and enriched with additional data, such as date in a numeric format and geolocation.

16. The GIST dataset consists of 217,863 inscriptions, enriched by 36 attributes.

17. Citation: Kae, V., Hemnkov, P., & Sobotkov, A. (2023). GIST (v1.1) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10139110

18. Accessible via ScienceData.dk

19. Modern trade data: The Growth Lab at Harvard University, 2019, Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/H8SFD2 (6.5 GB) Download from https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/H8SFD2&version=10.0

Scripts

1. Data generation

1. Python scripts in the folder data-generation were originally published by Kae V, Hemnkov P, Sobotkov A (2022) Division of labor, specialization and diversity in the ancient Roman cities: A quantitative approach to Latin epigraphy. PLoS ONE 17(6): e0269869. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269869 under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License. https://github.com/sdam-au/social_diversity and adjusted to the new data and purpose of the current project by Petra Hemnkov.

• Scripts are numbered in the order they should be run, starting from 1 to 4.
• Use version of the epigraphic dataset LIST 1.0.

2. Economic Complexity

1. Scripts in the folder economic_complexity: R scripts were generated by Matteo Mazzamurro to adjust the biases of epigraphic data and to compute economic complexity index on the basis of available epigraphic data.

• Script economic_complexity is the main script and should be run as the first one.
• NOTE: You may need to run the script in chunks, as it is computationally heavy (depending on your computer).

3. Paper Figures

1. Scripts in the folder paper_figures: Python scripts were generated by Michele Coscia to compute economic complexity index on the basis of available epigraphic data.

• Scripts are numbered in the strict order they should be run, starting from 1 to 8. The scripts backboning.py and network_distance.py contain custom libraries that are there for supporting the actual scripts and they should not be run on their own.
  
• NOTE: The scripts don't generate the figures per se, but the data files that are necessary to render the figures. These files will be put in the same script folder and some scripts depend on the outputs of previous scripts to run properly.
• Use version of the epigraphic dataset LIST 1.2 (contains the same number of inscriptions as LIST 1.0).
• Script 06_tab_1.py uses 6.5GB of trade data accessible from other location, indicated in the script. The data needs to be manually downloaded for the script to run.

4. Greek NLP [supplementary]

1. Script Greek_data_extraction_eval.Rmd in R, by Petra Hermankova, evaluates the computer assisted extraction methods, that extract the occupational data from Greek inscriptions. The sample data is manually evaluated (close reading of Greek inscriptions by Hermankova) to conform the current detection methods do not provide as reliable and robust data as in the case of Latin inscriptions.
2. Data Occupations_GREEK.tsv is a collection of Greek occupations collected by Hermankova from various publications and previously unpublished. If you would like to use it in your research, please, get in touch. The standard CC BY-SA 4.0 License applies.