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How are Rome's monuments still standing?
- noyeastguy 5y agoI wonder if there will come a time when society decides it's better to fix ruins such as the Colosseum and the pyramids instead of letting them just rot away.
- i_have_an_idea 5y agoWhat would be the practical purpose of "fixing" something like the pyramids? Vs. just preserving them as-is.
- stevenwoo 5y agoIIRC there was a protective limestone layer with a gold cap (removed for use in other buildings by later civilizations) on top of the pyramids versus leaving them as is, they originally did not look like unfinished stone. There is constant wind erosion on the exposed stone layer now. I don't know what a good solution to this now.
- noyeastguy 5y agoI think it would be cool to imagine ourselves as part of the process of civilization that created these buildings and restore them to their former glory. If the Mona Lisa was ripped in half we would surely restore it back to a single piece. Why should we not rebuild ancient Rome and host pop-up shops and events in the Forum?
- CubsFan1060 5y agoIt is an interesting thought, but I think your example doesn't work. In that we have two complete halves in need of minor repair. For ruins, we have parts left, and don't really even know for sure what it's supposed to look like. I mean, a very good idea, but not for sure. And especially, over time, you can end up with a bit of a ship of theseus. Also interesting -- if some day one of the earthquakes there knocks down part of the colosseum, will we rebuild the ruins to their ruinous state?
- literallyaduck 5y agoYou know, for grain storage, and for the ancient aliens to communicate through crystal power, or a flooded Bass Pro shop.
- retrac 5y agoWith the Colosseum at least, it didn't just sit there untouched for two thousand years. The locals have repaired it after disasters. And also partially torn it down. And then rebuilt it. About 150 years after it was built, it was partially destroyed by fire. And rebuilt. Another 200 years later there are inscriptions from late emperors who did more repair work. In the medieval era it was stripped of marble and suffered serious damage from an earthquake. In the 18th century it seems the Popes started to appreciate that it was historically significant, and various repairs and preservation activities have gone on ever since. One of the largest cleanings and repairs ever has just started in the last decade. How much to repair though? At a certain point you have to start taking out original work to replace the ruined interior, and I can understand the extreme reluctance to do that. As to the Pyramids, they've been rotting for 4300 years and they're still there mostly intact. The most severe damage was intentional acts in relatively recent history. As long as we don't decide to start tearing them down again for free stone, they'll probably outlast humanity.
- suzzer99 5y agoIt blows my mind that the Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest building in the world for 4,440 years (give or take 10), until the Eiffel Tower finally dethroned it.
- Bayart 5y agoThat time was two or three centuries ago.
- Cody_C 5y agoI saw an article a while back about the unique properties of ancient Roman cement. It seems that the sea water hitting the walls created a rare mineral when due to a chemical reaction. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22231 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22231 I often wonder about how things are built without preservation/archival in mind. We live in an age where so many things are built in so much faster than the past but, with the expectation that they will be replaced even faster than in the past.
- simonebrunozzi 5y agoTL;DR: their concrete was different. > Roman concrete, on the other hand, is a simpler mix of quicklime made from baking and crushing limestone rocks and, most importantly, volcanic rock aggregates of various types, which were abundant in the region surrounding Rome. In contrast to the aggregates used in modern concrete, these volcanic materials used by the Romans are highly reactive and the resulting concrete remains chemically active for centuries after it first hardens. By the way, I don't buy this entirely. Let me tell you why. The Pantheon is mostly stones and bricks, and "some" concrete to keep the bricks together. These large stones are held together by simple force of gravity, very much like the Pyramids in Egypt (~4,000 years old, or double the age of the Colosseum or the Pantheon). I'm not a materials engineer (just a software engineer). Can someone with more knowledge comment on my view?
- microtherion 5y agoThe explanation in the article is fascinating, but I wonder how much the Romans knew about the durability of their concrete at the time, and to what extent they just got lucky by the mix of material that happened to be available in their area.
- SQueeeeeL 5y agoI feel like a single human could trial and error their way to a very good paper airplane over the course of 2 or 3 days. It seems pretty obvious that a large group of people would trial and error products in much the same way, especially those so essential to their civilization. Especially with the large trade networks that we know to exist back then.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ardit33 5y agoIt is both..... so both the author and you are correct. Modern concrete has rebar, which eventually gets rusted, and corroded, and fails (in 150-200 years). Also, roman concrete was just thicker/used more material. Also simple stone survives forever, while brick a bit less, and 'simpler mud bricks' and wood a lot less. SO, from Roman times, really only the strongest buildings survived, and everything else is gone. So, there is a survivor bias. We are only looking at the strongest buildings, and not the average one.
- cblconfederate 5y agoThey didn't use javascript?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- agumonkey 5y agoThey did https://rome.tools/ https://rome.tools/
- basementcat 5y agoRome wasn’t written in a day.
- jspash 5y agoNo, it was more like 10 days.
- nescioquid 5y agoIn fact it was, but on the second day, it would no longer compile. After a long debugging session, Romulus realized Remus had unpublished the hWall (or aMoenia) function in the night. Romulus then murdered his brother.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- agumonkey 5y agoRomulus remus asyncronus
- cblconfederate 5y agoJSPQR
- KSS42 5y agoHere’s some great videos on this question from YouTuber ToldinStone - Garret Ryan Author of Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators and War Elephants Why was Roman concrete forgotten during the Middle Ages? https://youtu.be/dbvvlFHCNn4 https://youtu.be/dbvvlFHCNn4 See also his YouTube series: History of Rome in 15 Buildings The Colosseum: https://youtu.be/m6iHR8zqbiM https://youtu.be/m6iHR8zqbiM
- anm89 5y agoTold in Stone is a fantastic channel. Really interesting without ever trying too hard to be entertaining or dumbing it down
- atdrummond 5y agoThey’re not. The Romans built a huge amount and much of their artistic architectural works remaining today were purposely preserved, even if reused for some alternative purpose. Yes, there are some construction techniques they used that contributed to better survival rates than some other structure types. But mostly we’ve ended up with what was lucky enough to survive. Replay the historical tape again and we might be surprised by what didn’t survive war, fires, other natural disasters on the second go round.
- cblconfederate 5y ago> for the same reasons we preserve Victorian era buildings. Not really, christians destroyed a huge amount and ruthlessly, and tons of marble was 'repurposed'. The best chance of a building to survive was being used as a church
- atdrummond 5y agoI suppose I just don’t find that substantially different than the National Trust repurposing say Ickworth into a hotel. I understand that contemporary society places a higher value on a certain type of “accurate” preservation than many societies that came before but if people had truly wanted historical Roman buildings gone, they would be.
- cblconfederate 5y agotons of pagan roman and greek statues were destroyed. what's left today is only a tiny amount
- atdrummond 5y agoI agree? My original reply’s point was we have a very small minority of what the empire constructed. And much of that is because it was purposely preserved, if for alternative reasons.
- pmontra 5y ago
- bennysomething 5y agoSurely it should be "why are Rome's monuments..." Or am I mistaken, I'm not actually sure
- freefal 5y agoEither reads fine to me.
- emmelaich 5y ago'how' sounds a bit wrong to me, too. But it's popular in the USA.
- arcticfox 5y agoThey sound the same to me (native American English).
- moosedev 5y agoNative speaker (Brit in USA) here. Either one is fine, although they have subtle differences in meaning and implication (to me) in this context. The first thing that struck me before I gave this any real thought is that "How" here connotes a little incredulity or even amazement (to me). There's an implied, rhetorical sense of unlikelihood of the fact. ("How are Rome's monuments still standing?! Shouldn't they have fallen down by now?") "How" also implies (to me) that we seek an explanation of processes, means, techniques, or methods. It invites an answer that's somehow more dynamic and more detailed. "Why" is asking "for what reason(s)?" The "Why" version of the question feels more direct, but the answer space is broader and more abstract. "How" feels, forgive me, more concrete here than "Why" :) How -> explain the processes, techniques, or workings. Why -> explain the reasons/causes. Obviously, there's overlap there, and the distinction is subtle, so perhaps some of this is only in my head :) I found http://www.differencebetween.net/language/grammar-language/difference-between-how-and-why/ http://www.differencebetween.net/language/grammar-language/d... which seems to half-agree.
- bennysomething 5y agoInteresting! It's got even more confusing since I moved to Scotland! https://www.google.com/search?q=how%20vs%20why%20scotland&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-m https://www.google.com/search?q=how%20vs%20why%20scotland&ie... (I'm a native English speaker too,and would have defaulted to why, how is jarring to me, but I notice myself saying more and more)
- nraynaud 5y agoone very impressive feat is the Pont du Gard, this thing has been in disuse for 1500 years, and lots of stones have been looted over the centuries. And its aspect ratio is somewhat thin.
- wsinks 5y agoSurvivorship Bias The ones that are still standing were built really well. Each will have its own reason for standing so long.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoBut what are those reasons?
- dr-detroit 5y ago
- GuB-42 5y agoSure, but the fact that some monuments have held that well is impressive. It might have been a happy accident, it most likely was, but the valuable insight here is that we know that there is a recipe for concrete that lasts for thousands of years in real world conditions. We probably can do better today, we have a much better understanding of chemistry and computer simulations, but what we can't do is conduct a thousand year long experiment, and that's the Roman empire have done to us.
- roca 5y agoDid the Romans really know that using certain volcanic rocks would make their concrete structures last longer? Or did they mostly just use whatever aggregate was convenient and the structures that have survived are the ones that used the right rocks? The latter sounds more plausible to me. Of course we can still learn valuable lessons from these surviving structures.
- WalterBright 5y agoRome lasted for many centuries, so I imagine they were familiar with what worked and what didn't.
- SQueeeeeL 5y agoJonathan Blow makes a bunch of great points about our simplified view of ancient people, versus the reality of their complex achievements which could only be brought about by lots of ingenuity and iterations. https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk
- bcrosby95 5y agoThe interconnectedness of the bronze age was amazing. To make bronze required combining metals sourced from thousands of miles away from eachother. In comparison, iron could be made basically anywhere.
- codethief 5y agoEven for reasons other than Rome's history, this is one of the best talks I've ever seen. IMO every software engineer should watch it and I recommend it to colleagues all the time.
- thoughtsimple 5y agoHe started off well with the history of civilization collapse but then he got the heart of his presentation with the misguided idea that modern software is more broken recently. He showed some incomprehensible bugs in Visual Studio. All I have to say is that on Windows the Blue Screen of Death was a prominent problem for many years. On the original MacOS that was non-preemptive multitasking and no memory hardware protection, any program could cause a denial of service or take down the whole computer. These are 30 year old technologies that were clearly worse in many ways than modern equivalents. Has software improved recently? No, I would say it has gotten somewhat worse recently but if you look at where we are today versus say 1998, things are clearly better. It isn't really possible to know if we are in a major decline or a minor local minimum.
- hnplj 5y ago
- thinkski 5y agoDoes make me wonder what we’re building today that will last. I suppose the engineers who worked on Voyager or Pathfinder have the best shot of having built something enduring.
- anshumankmr 5y agoAssuming it never crashes into a planet/a star/an alien spaceship, it is probably going to outlast the human race.
- kart23 5y agoI've read the hoover dam is engineered to last at least 10,000 years, and much longer if 'properly maintained'.
- rurp 5y agoTangentially related to this, one of my hobbies is to explore old long abandoned ghost towns and mining camps in the Southwest US. It is really impressive how well many of these structures have held up in harsh climates. One of my favorite parts is seeing how repairs were improvised in the wilderness using whatever supplies happened to be available. The standard approach to trash back then was to throw it in a pile nearby. Picking through those dumps can be really fascinating and a surprising amount of items are still in good shape. A simple heuristic for how old a glass bottle is is how thick it is. A modern beer bottle looks paper thin compared to one a century old. Looking at old structures and tools really makes vivid how disposable many modern items are.
- emodendroket 5y agoIsn't the Southwest uniquely not harsh? The biggest enemy of most man-made structures is water.
- jorts 5y agoThe sun is brutal on anything that isn’t metal.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoor rock ... or dirt ... or glass ...
- yencabulator 5y agoAnd most of the rock in the Southwest US is sandstone which will fall apart if you look at it funny.
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoDepends on the material I'd say. Large temperature swings like common in the desert certainly don't help. Wind/sand abrasion could also be an issue. But in general you're right, desert climates can be good for preserving things. The only thing better would probably be a permanent ice cover.
- nitwit005 5y agoHow many of these have undergone serious repairs? I've seen multiple news stories about colosseum repairs and renovations during my lifetime, and I'm sure there were plenty of earlier efforts. Rome has burned or been hit by major earthquakes multiple times since these things were built.
- freewilly1040 5y agoI’m currently wrapping up a trip touring many ancient monuments during winter (aka off-season), and nearly all of them were having some kind of renovation work being done. Usually it’s a combination of whatever ancient stone is left from antiquity, combined with new material of the same type that would have been used originally (though not in all cases, there is some form of “artificial stone” that is used at times, not sure of what that is). So, my guess at the answer to your question would be all of them, many times over.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- marginalia_nu 5y agoIt's struck me, reading roman authors, that they were considerably more obsessed with building a legacy than we are. Not just getting powerful or famous in life, but entering the history books, to become big name like Scipio Africanus. May be that it comes with living in an "eternal" city that's been the same as long as anyone can remember, with generations coming and going and most human activity washed away like sand castles on the shores of oblivion. Making some form of lasting mark seems almost urgent when you look at it from that perspective.
- cblconfederate 5y agoStill i think they would be surprised at how much of their civilization has survived in ours 2k years later.
- ithkuil 5y ago"the Romans empire never ended, we just call it the Catholic Church now" (Obviously a joke, but not that silly as it looks at first sight)
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoHard to know if their culture was different, it could easily be a case of survival bias. Those obsessed with creating a legacy for themselves were more likely to create a legacy that lasted. Think about all your contemporaries, unless they're incredibly famous their story will be lost in time.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoA lot of this is second hand accounts, i.e. people talking about other peoples' feverish quests for leaving a legacy, not always in positive terms.
- yosito 5y agoWhen I was in Rome, I was struck by how many wealthy people had created monuments to themselves. There were statues of people, everywhere.
- asimpletune 5y agoIt’s not just the monuments. Everywhere you go in Rome there are fountains with cold, clean drinkable water. The combination of the roads, rivers, infrastructure, and monuments leaves you feeling like we kind of aimed a little low, at times.
- Bayart 5y agoThe fountains have nothing to do with (ancient) Romans. Italians didn't invent modern water management.
- asimpletune 5y agoReally? I thought those fountains were a public service in Roman antiquity as well?
- Bayart 5y agoThey're not the same fountains, nor the same water grid (through the modern grid might use portions of the Roman one). There were centuries where Rome was completely abandoned and reduced to a collection of villages and feudal holdings. They used wells for water access.
- asimpletune 5y agoSuper interesting, ok I think I just assumed otherwise but thanks for the explanation. One follow up though, did ancient Romans have fountains? Maybe not the same ones that exist today, but more or less did they, ancient Romans, have these public water services as well?
- freyir 5y agoYes. “For more than two thousand years fountains have provided drinking water and decorated the piazzas of Rome. During the Roman Empire, in 98 AD, according to Sextus Julius Frontinus, the Roman consul who was named curator aquarum or guardian of the water of the city, Rome had nine aqueducts which fed 39 monumental fountains and 591 public basins, not counting the water supplied to the Imperial household, baths and owners of private villas. Each of the major fountains was connected to two different aqueducts, in case one was shut down for service.” -Wikipedia.
- zeckalpha 5y agoAnother “monument” still standing: Latin script. It has survived an unusually long time.
- eointierney 5y agowe learn slowly
- bmitc 5y agoThe sources of the concrete blocks aren't specified, but here's a one-off hydraulic press test. https://youtu.be/Tba0il8IFF4 https://youtu.be/Tba0il8IFF4
- abinaya_rl 5y agoTalking about historical monuments and structures, I'm still amazed at how this temple[1] has been constructed without all the tech that we have now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brihadisvara_Temple,_Thanjavur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brihadisvara_Temple,_Thanjavur
- a_bonobo 5y agoOne other explanation is that many of these monuments didn't stand around undisturbed for 2,000 years, a lot of work of hundreds of generations of humans went into these monuments. The Porta Nigra is a great example - it's an ancient Roman city gate in Trier, Germany, still standing since it was built in 170 AD. The ground floor was buried for a long time (>800 years?) preserving it. The gate was a ruin for a few hundred years, around 1000 AD a church was built around the gate keeping the construction in place. As part of a general de-'churchification' 1802 Napoleon had the church-part taken off and had the gate and its insides fixed up (while the ground floor was still buried!). So the gate didn't have to survive on its own.
- mro_name 5y agoThe Romans had no arabic numerals and no arithmetic - that's why the statics of the buildings were not calculated. So some were over- and others under-dimensioned. You only see the over-dimensioned ones. They are still standing today.
- ogogmad 5y agoAre you sure? You can do calculations geometrically with tools like compasses and straight-edges. No need for numerals. Here's a practical way using a compass and straight edge: https://janmr.com/blog/2010/04/arithmetic-by-geometry/ https://janmr.com/blog/2010/04/arithmetic-by-geometry/ Here's a contrived way, but using only a straight edge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Georg_Christian_von_Staudt#Algebra_of_throws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Georg_Christian_von_Staud...