Replication data for : The Towers on the Roman Coptos-Myos Hormos Road in Egypt

The article linked with this data set explores the role and chronology of the dozens of towers built along the Roman Coptos-Myos Hormos road in Egypt, using visibility analysis. The study concludes that their primary role was to monitor traffic rather than to transmit messages across the desert, during the 2nd century CE. The present repository contains the geographical dataset and processing used to create the visibility network discussed in the article. The towers were identified and located based on the four maps produced by Meredith 1958, Prickett 1979, Zitterkopf and Sidebotham 1989 and Brun, et al. 2003. The locations were refined and improved by photointerpretation using satellite images from Microsoft® Bing™ Satellite, Google Earth Pro® (version 7.3.3.7786), Maxar Imagery and the Pleiades satellites (CNES, primary, natural colour pansharpened 50 cm, Airbus Defence and Space). Some identifications were supported by the consultation of the excavation reports available for certain areas. The visibility analyses were carried out with the intervisibility network and viewshed tools in the QGIS 3 Visibility analysis plugin (version 1.5, 2015, Zoran Čučković). The TanDEM-X 0.4 arcsec digital elevation model used was provided by the German Aerospace Center (©DLR 2019) but cannot be shared by us due to user policy.