Check out the floor of the Pantheon, in Rome. THAT IS THE ORIGINAL FLOOR. People have been walking on it for 2,000 years and it's still gorgeous.
The sheer competency of these guys was unbelievable.
The sheer competency of these guys was unbelievable.
But the woman and man in the lower right of the picture are weirding me out. It seems there are two men almost identical walking one in front of the other, next to two women who also look almost identical walking one in front of the other - but the woman's clothing has changed colors. I'm assuming it is some panorama software weirdness as I see other strange artifacts, but changing the colors to give the impression of different people following each other is... interesting.
If you look just slightly to the right of center, it looks like a partial image of the same woman appears again, weirdly cut off and out of scale (just her left shoulder and arm).
If you're a Roman working on that roof, you know you're doing something totally unprecedented in human history. So you pull out all the stops with an utterly heroic feat of engineering and construction. That's very impressive, but when it comes to the floor -- well, plenty of buildings have floors, nothing groundbreaking about that. So, y'know, just call the flooring contractors and have them install something nice.
The fact that something relatively ordinary is still performing so well, a couple thousand years later, is what blows my mind. Today, I'm sure that a gathering of the world's greatest engineers would be capable of designing a dome that would last for millennia. But I doubt there's any flooring contractor on earth who would give even a hundred-year guarantee on their work.