While considering the ancient road network of Anatolia, central and southern Cappadocia could very well have served as a major hub or pivotal area, and merits our special attention on account of its strategic importance both in the military and in the economic senses.
The whole district was, indeed, passed through by a series of roads, which effectively linked east and west, as well as south and north. The ‘southern’ directrix leading from Konya/Iconium to the Cilician Gates, running across the Çakıt Suyu valley, ensured smooth and easy communication between the Anatolian plateau and the Mediterranean shores of Cilicia. The ‘northern’ highway from Konya/Iconium to Aksaray/Colonia Arcilaida and Kayseri/Caesarea - which has at least been in use from the Achaemenid period to nowadays - connected the inner land to the eastern boundary of Anatolia and especially to the Euphrates district. Another historically important road from Kayseri/Caesarea to the Cilician Gates joined the former directrix to the latter, closing that sort of wide and hypothetical ‘road triangle’ - whose vertexes being Konya, Kayseri and the Cilician Gates – which has really characterised that frontier territory. This thesis tries to describe all that road system, which has been in use, even if in different ways, through time till nowadays.
The ancient road-tracks have been reconstructed by a renewed study of Greek, Roman and Byzantine literary and epigraphic sources, new archaeological data, new surveys conducted on-site and by remote sensing analysis. And all these have led to a reconsideration of the various hypotheses advanced by scholars with regard to the actual line taken by these arterial roads, and they have drawn us to propose a more congruous picture of the ancient road network which existed in this border territory that linked East and West
