"With the complete transportation network, we were able to proceed and determine specific parameters of each node on the network based on political and religious proxies or the outcome of network analysis; the relationships among these parameters were then statistically evaluated with respect to the research problem.

Initially, the nodes were parameterized with respect to their role within the transportation network—we used two classifiers. First, as was already stated above, we identified nodes that represented major Hellenistic cities based on the Pleiades database [34]. These nodes were considered important because of their prestige and larger population sizes and were incorporated as crucial nodes in the further analyses. Also, our network has two modes of transportation; thus, we classified the nodes also based on their intermodal function—whether they were directly connected to the maritime and/or inland routes. This parameter solved one more problem—the major cities in this region were often operating through a close port represented in our network by a different node and that way we were able to link the ports with their neighboring cities.

To quantify the presence of the Isiac cults on the network, we geocoded the archaeological evidence related to the Isiac cults from the time and area of interest. For this dataset, we used Laurent Bricault’s corpus Recueil des inscriptions concernant les cultes isiaques (RICIS, [4]).We categorized the data from RICIS into two groups with respect to their type: 1) artifacts (altars, statues, inscriptions, etc.); 2) temples (Fig 3). This categorization helped to characterize the quality of the cult presence—temples are conceptualized as indicators of more durable and significant presence than artifacts. Furthermore, we divided these data based on their dating in order to analyze different “waves” of the spread with respect to chronology."