Percorsi potenziali/percorsi storici nella Siria del periodo islamico

This contribution is part of a larger research on the historical routes of Syria that aims at investigating them through gis - base and postdictive methods and analysis. In this article, the authors focus on the study of the Aleppo-Damascus road, one of the major thoroughfare of the Near East during the Islamic period. The road is firstly reconstructed on the basis of the historical (e.g. travelogues, geographical texts, etc.) and archeological (caravanserais) sources, then several potential roads are created using gis. The method exploits the potential and characteristics of the cost surface to create several least cost paths that take into account both natural and anthropic factors. The historical track (or tracks) and the potential path are successively compared in order to understand which factors could have played a major role in defining the layout of the road.