How are Rome's monuments still standing?
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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.
Arizona will also get monsoons and flash floods.
One rather interesting memory...I remember my father rebuilding an old barnish structure with railroad ties for the frame. Apparently they soak those suckers in tar...out in the sun each day they'd start sweating some black tar stuff again that's nearly impossible to get off your hands. Those haven't aged a day in 20ish years. Makes me curious why more structural wood isn't treated this way.
The lost knowledge and, even more importantly, the fundamental resource depletion/extinction caused by our activities which result in both the knowledge of *how* to do/accomplish/build/mend/heal, as well as the actual natural resources required to execute that knowledge in a meaningful or impactful way on your life...
--- However the Chestnut appears to be largely wiped out by two separate blights
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/04/29/what-it-takes-bri...
After some reading and thinking, I decided just to bake the thing at 250. It sweated tons of that awful red jelly out, then never again.
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not for polluting the groundwater, but seems it can be mitigated with proper heat treating prior.
For railroad ties specifically, I imagine it would be deemed way too much cost. But for say, house framing lumber... guaranteed termite free forever, I think people would pay for it.
[1]: https://www.homedepot.com/c/ab/types-of-pressure-treated-woo...
Naturally the cheap stuff didn't tend to even remotely make it this far.
Curious what your opinion is as I haven't heard much about tools etc.
The transition from hand built to machine built and the general miniaturisation of most mechanical/electronic systems since the 80s also means it gets harder and harder to fix. I do believe stuff was made better in term of repairability and simplicity, simply because they didn't have any other ways.
That's why you can pick up virtually any pre 1960 camera and repair it but cameras from the late 80s early 90s are incredibly finicky. I just picked up a camera from 1950, opened it, cleaned its lens elements / shutter mechanism and it works just as good as when it came out of the factory. It took me an hour and two screw drivers to go from "unusable paperweight" to "fully functional", the most advanced pieces of machinery in there are metal gears and springs.
There are a couple factors that would result in a longer lasting tool of Yore...
There were no plastics and other ephemeral materials, and so tool handles were wood, leather or metal.
There was no 'mass production at global scale' - effectively every tool was hand made, or made by machines that were made by hand to make the tools -- and all of which were done without aid of computational mathematical prowess-by-proxy...
So, smaller batches of potentially longer lasting product because everything was continually being crafted by hand and observed by human eye...
Would you be willing to pay double for your new home to make it last 300 years instead of 100?
Also, I think every generation has products that last a really long time. My personal example is that 30 years ago I saved up my allowance to buy a casio keyboard, which after a few years moved into an unheated attic, and then some more years after that to a cold and damp basement. Recently I dug it up out of the basement, wiped off a thick layer of gunk, put in a fresh set of batteries, and aside from one status led not working it works as well as the day I bought it, and even the plastic hasn’t discolored much.
There's a reason you pretty much never see 100yr old unmaintained wood and masonry structures in New England, midwest, the PNW, etc.
Most modern products/methods/coatings deteriorate very quickly in the extreme temperature swings of the desert. If they're exposed to the sunlight, most things can't handle the UV in combination with the extreme temperatures.
I own a desert property and do a lot of DIY construction/maintenance. To argue it's not harsh is extremely uninformed.
My parents are in the midwest which is where I lived into my 20s, and my dad did a lot of DIY maintenance on their house which I helped with. There was no comparison in terms of how quickly things deteriorated there vs. here in the Mojave where I have property. The "15-year" Behr brand exterior paint I put on a refinished shed ~2 years ago is already cracking and peeling off, simply because the substrate undergoes such extreme thermal expansion and contraction daily between the day-night cycle, with the UV quickly embrittling the skin.
The main problem we had back in IL was ice-heaving of roads and patios/sidewalks. But asphalt-shingled roofs easily lasted over a decade, barring some exceptional tornado-style event ripping them apart. Asphalt shingles quickly become embrittled in the desert, and the frequent gale-force winds break them off. It's why you find Terracotta/slate/metal roofs so common in the desert; the environment is too harsh for the cheaper asphalt shingle stuff you find across the country.
And it's not like deserts don't get freezing temps or snowfall. My last camping trip in Joshua Tree National Park concluded with my tent collapsing on me under a snow load.
Airlines and the military parks aircraft in the desert for storage because with a little bit of prep work at the beginning the aircraft will stay in good shape. Constant rain would be far worse.
It does rain, and when it rains it's often a blowy monsoon of doom, assaulting desiccated wood structures which more often than not have developed some leaks from the year-round wind/sandstorm/thermal/UV abuse and complacency promoted by deceptively always-dry conditions.
And when lumber that has been dry and 120F+ for half a year abruptly gets soaked in water, its dimensions quickly change in non-uniform ways; it twists, bends, splits, and softens. If any of this moistened wood juice finds its way down into the ground, subterranean termites discover the food source in a veritable food desert. I think you can guess what follows.
The desert's evolved long-lasting structures are shrub-sized and endure by retreating underground. Otherwise there's rocks.
Yes, and they are continuously maintained by the living tree's processes, building everything from new roots, bark, branches and leaves. The question you need to ask is how long a dead redwood stays standing in the Pacific Northwest? What is the proportion of standing live to standing dead trees? How long does a fallen redwood trunk last, even starting out 20 feet thick?
>>The desert's evolved long-lasting structures are shrub-sized and endure by retreating underground
Yup, due to the same processes - the high heat and low humidity make very large transpiration loads, evaporating water very rapidly from the leaves, so tall structures with huge capillary capacity are unsustainable. It isn't because they wear out fast from the wind.
You seem to be mistaking attributes of biological growth processes for attributes of mechanical wear processes.
The desert is very harsh for life, but much more gentle on structures. Even when it does rain the arid environment evaporates it away quickly.
It's not even a close comparison, you find structures from the 1960s in the southeast that are far more deteriorated than ones from the 1860s in the southwest.
SW-America is definitely on my bucket list and I love ghost towns. In Western Europe it's hard to find any abandoned place older than a couple of years that's preserved well. I guess it's because the next city is never very far and there's always uncultured idiots whose idea of fun it is to vandalize places for no reason.
Another favorite site I didn't mention are the old mining structures. Image search for something like "old mining headframe" to see the sort of thing I'm talking about. There are a lot of those structures still standing from many decades ago.
Walmart used this as an argument for styrofoam cups.
The energy use of washing bottles was never a concern. The energy use of transporting heavy bottles was largely offset by globalizing beverage production.
Same people who concluded sodas are healthy I assume
Though the rare ones I get I just throw in the glass recycling that'll be crushed, made into new bottles and insulation material.
Brown, Green, and Transparent glass gets sorted, smashed, and melted back down into new bottles.
I wonder if that is due to how much smoother transportation is now.
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.
Think about all your contemporaries, unless they're incredibly famous their story will be lost in time.
I guess the point is that building a legacy of infrastructure is, generally, not economical and therefore should be foregone in favor of building a legacy of financial holdings.
But Rome’s founding just 750 years earlier was mythological because the place was too remote to even have written history until much later. Virgil had to invent a Trojan connection to elevate the national epic.
Or that’s my guess anyways
(Obviously a joke, but not that silly as it looks at first sight)
A time preference of 0 is equivalent to never consuming (e.g. never consuming the earth in its entirety).
Author of Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators and War Elephants
Why was Roman concrete forgotten during the Middle Ages?
See also his YouTube series: History of Rome in 15 Buildings
The Colosseum: https://youtu.be/m6iHR8zqbiM
Of course we can still learn valuable lessons from these surviving structures.
Why not both? How do you think you discover that certain things work better than others?
Humans are clever in any time.
For example, the Pantheon has a very specific profile (thick at bottom to much thinner at center of rise) to the dome in order to allow unreinforced concrete to be used. That's a case of very deliberate design.
Pompeii is in a highly volcanic area. So, digging is difficult and expensive. This put a wrench in the standard formula for Roman building. So, instead, they elevated everything slightly. That's on the spot ingenuity and convenience.
Finally, there is a survivorship bias--structures specifically built with longevity and durability in mind and maintained by people are the ones that survived.
Taking the rebar out of a building tends to make it a touch less durable.
The Pantheon was turned into a church, and thus was off limits. In Rome they call it "recycling".
An interesting article: https://engineeringrome.org/ancient-structures-in-rome-the-c...
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.
It reminds me of Shepard Tones which sound like they are infinitely increasing in pitch which is impossible because the human ear can only hear certain frequencies. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzNzgsAE4F0)
Their business model was (and to a degree still is) predicated on getting people used to everything having bugs, and not complaining or, more importantly, returning it for a refund, angrily. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and now everything else works almost as badly.
In comparison, iron could be made basically anywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_architectura
Ptolemy (100-170AD) wrote treatises on many subjects, and his works on astronomy and geography "never ceased to be copied or commented upon, both in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy
Vegetius wrote a military manual On military matters, extremely influential until about 1500.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetius
Apicius wrote On the Subject of Cooking, a cook book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius
(So much ancient writing hasn't survived, e.g. none of Aristotle's many writings survived - what we know as his writings are just his students' lecture notes.)
So many being lost is an inevitable consequence of very very few copies ever existing.
Plinys “Natural History” contained detailed geographic information, but was considered a work of history (surprise, surprise).
Arguably Roman concrete was discovered by accident when someone mixed a batch of lime plaster using the volcanic ash around Pozzuoli instead of regular sand.
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?
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.
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/d... which seems to half-agree.
It's got even more confusing since I moved to Scotland!
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)
"Why is something still standing" could be circumstances related - eg all the other ones got demolished except this one for reason x, or y group of people stepped in to maintain it etc
"How is something still standing" sounds more like the method for it standing - eg the structure had some extra cross bracing on the lower level etc
Maybe it's just me :)
So, my guess at the answer to your question would be all of them, many times over.
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.
You only see the over-dimensioned ones. They are still standing today.
Here's a practical way using a compass and straight edge: 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_Staud...
> 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?
But the steel rusts after a couple of decades.
Rusted steel is marginally larger than new steel.
So when the steel bars expand by rusting, it pushes against the concrete from the inside, causing cracks. Then lots of water can get in it rusts faster.
Eventually chunks of concrete fall off and structural collapse follows.
If we built like the Romans, it would be more expensive, but would last 1k+ years.
normal steel rebar=1
epoxy coated rebar=1.1-1.3 <- terrible in practice
zinc coated rebar=1.2-1.4 <- good
stainless steel rebar=3-4-5 <- very, very good
carbon fiber rebar=? <- AFAIK not used in new buildings, as it has a series of issues in practice, used in some rare cases of consolidation/repair of old buildings, mostly not as rebar but rather as mesh/net.
What is used, not as "main" reinforcement but to have a (much better) mass strength are fibers, they can be either steel or plastic.
Not so surprisingly the higher the cost the longer the duration.
Or, is there any promising technology that allows to use steel bars that have some space inside, so that when they rust, they don't break the concrete?
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.
There's absolutely nothing special about Roman monuments.
While the article title is a blanket question on ALL Roman monuments - which clearly didn't all survive - the article is about people investigating how the long lasting ones do what they do.
Which sounds great to me.
The reason why multiple structures still hold today and will hold longer than most of our structures is more simple than that: they over-engineered the shit of everything that still hold today. Also for the same reasons, multiple bridges, castles, church or structures built between the low medieval era and high med/renaissance will likely last as much as roman structures did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brihadisvara_Temple,_Thanjavur
The ones that are still standing were built really well. Each will have its own reason for standing so long.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column_of_Phocas
The city had been sacked multiple times at that point and I suppose it was the best they could do.
https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/gods-in-color-ancient-...
Seems HN quality has gone downhill since what I last remember.
Rather than spend my effort fighting a battle others have fought, here is an older HN thread with good commentary on the topic and links to countless previous discussions as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22580920
Here’s a thread from 6 months ago where there is significant discussion about why concrete is used the way it is today. Those parameters/considerations differ from those that the Romans would have faced. And, again, we only have the best examples of Roman cement today available for analysis versus the very wide range of construction quality that occurs today.
The very article linked also explains some of the limitations/ways in which Roman cement isn’t ideal/superior - for one, the massively longer curing time.
Romans invented concrete, and it was so good that still today the average concrete can't compete with it (its resistance to cracks is one example)
Rewind history and roman buildings would still be there.
They are thought to be one of the few things that would survive human extinction.
The only thing that would outlast them are Giza Pyramids.
Another comment made my point better than I did - which was that Roman buildings that remained standing did so because they were useful for some purpose, often an alternative one (such as a church). It speaks to their value specifically as architecture and is mostly orthogonal to their construction techniques. There are plenty of old buildings (such as Hōryū-ji, Ruwanweli Maha Seya, Mousa Broch, etc) that don’t use any kind of magical construction techniques but have stuck around because of their value to the surrounding society and active efforts at preservation and/or repurposing.
This is true, but rather misleading. Hōryū-ji burned down and is probably around 80-90% new material.
The Roman concrete structures on the other hand survived this long with their original construction materials.
that's a fallacy.
A lot of buildings were useful back then, it wasn't easy to build them nor cheap.
But most of them collapsed, because they weren't strong enough.
You get roman buildings everywhere in Europe and Northern Africa, a lot of civilizations lived there in the past 40 centuries and their remains are scarce at best.
It is like saying that Amazon beat many other startups of its times because they got lucky, it's simply because their execution was better than the competition.
I am from Rome, live in Rome, in front of the Forum of Augustus (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_of_Augustus), there's a large number of Roman buildings that never became churches.
Trust me, the Domus Aurea was never a church, Villa Adriana has never been a church,they are both UNESCO's World Heritage Sites.
I think the misunderstanding comes from the fact that romans built several Basilica (for example the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine), but for romans basilica meant a different thing: from the Greek word "stoà basileiós" the term basilica refers to the function of a building as that of a meeting hall. In ancient Rome, basilicas were the site for legal matters to be carried out and a place for business transactions.
Most of them never became religious buildings, they remained public places to meet other people.
> most ancient buildings did not just simply collapse due to age but were destroyed by people who wanted to reuse their building material.
that happened to roman buildings as well, Colosseum is maybe a third of what originally it was made of, but it's still standing and survived a massive earthquake in 1349 that opened a huge crack in it, but didn't destroy it.
Because of its build quality.
I'm not denying that Roman construction techniques were advanced, but it's not like we have much to compare them against. Sure, there aren't as many well preserved Etruscan or Greek ruins in Italy, but they preceded the Romans, had way less resources and not as advanced technology. And the same happened to the Romans who were eventually surpassed by medieval and renaissance Europeans. There magnitudes more surviving medieval buildings compared to Roman buildings, just like there are magnitudes (I would assume) more Roman ones compared ones built by Etruscans/etc.
But that does not mean that Roman architecture was somehow inherently superior. For example had the Carthaginians or some Greek state conquered the mediterranean instead of the Romans (obviously that was unlikely due to various non architecture related reasons) and had the resources to build as much as the Romans did would less of their buildings have survived or would they have been of worse quality everything else staying equal?
Thanks for the question.
It would be a very long discussion to have in details, starting from the fact that even in ancient Rome there was some culture of preservation, like the restoration of 82 temples in the programs of Augustus (see “Preservation Practices in Ancient and Medieval Rome”), but it wasn't until 15th century that a real program of preservation and protection of old buildings was created by the papacy.
Rome was, more than any other city of its times, subject to invasions and destruction of its ancient monuments, used as construction material for new buildings and churches. The need for churches was actually more a detriment than a a blessing.
The capital was moved to Constantinople more than a century before the sack of Rome and the fall of the western Roman empire, its monuments, its marbles, its travertine, its bricks, have been for more than a millennium up for grabs, by many conquerors.
In Greek cities, for example, there were no monuments to steal from, because they had been ruins for centuries already, Rome almost disappeared during the middle ages and, but the need for materials and the sacks never stopped, making new buildings, every time larger and richer, was the new normal, it was probably the most prolific period in history.
The fact that so many Roman buildings survived despite most of the original material was removed and used somewhere else, it's kinda miraculous.
Take for example two great historical figures: Alexander the great and Genghis Khan, their empires were immense, some of the largest in history, but buildings of their era are virtually non existent.
It wasn't their strongest trait, they were not builders.
Compare them to the Mesopotamians or the Egyptians and it becomes easier to see the difference.
Greeks influenced a lot both Etruscan and Romans, but it was more of a style.
Advanced construction techniques in Etruscan region were brought directly by Greek natives, but only the most privileged classes built proper houses, the rest of the population was living in villages made by tents or wooden shelters.
That's why very few of them survived.
One thing is that most places with extremely old structures have them far and few between. A 2000 year old building that wasn't rebuilt from the ground up is often a symbol of national pride for a country and seen as somewhat of a miracle that it's still standing. What makes Rome unique is the city alone is full of such structures, and it's a living, active city. In other countries that had a Roman presence, many of their oldest structures are remains built by Romans.
Most Egyptian structures were buried under sand for millennia and well-preserved as a consequence of that. I have to wonder how they'd hold up if they were in a different climate and with humans bustling about constantly into the modern era.
Either way, Romans were clearly doing something special.
If Rome had remained a densely inhabited city most of the ruins would had likely been completely destroyed and built over (besides a few temples which were converted to churches). If we look at smaller Roman cities like Cadiz, London, Paris, Milan etc. there aren't that many traces of Roman times there because their population levels eventually rebounded during middle ages.
"Among the biggest obstacles to wider adoption of the Roman recipe are its long curing time – it can take up to six months to reach full strength, compared to standard concrete's' 28 days – and lower strength (Perucchio said it's approximately 10 times weaker than modern concrete),"
I completely agree, we can't dismiss survivorship bias.
But let's imagine we are in a speculative historical sci-fi novel.
An ancient civilization makes contact with an alien one and they gain access to a new powerful way of building that had no precedent in history.
Fast forward 50 years, aliens are gone for good, there's no easy way for the layman people to access documentation let alone understand it, people will obviously don't understand what's going on, but they would see older buildings collapse after a mild earthquake or be destroyed by a wild fire, while some of them would survive, mutliple times.
They would most probably think of them as safer structures and give them more value and try to preserve them because of their "magical" ability to survive catastrophic events.
They would probably think of those buildings as gods gifts or sth like that.
Imagine that instead of 50 years it went on for almost a millennium.
And then the knowledge on how they were built got lost.