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The Great Builders
Roman Buildings: The
Colosseum was built of concrete, faced with stone, as were most
amphitheaters.
The Romans also used concrete (an ancient Roman invention!) to build
the dome of the Pantheon, a temple dedicated to all the Roman gods, which
even today is still one of the largest single-span domes in the world. They
used concrete to build the underwater port facilities at Caesarea in Israel
(fantastic technology, still analyzed by modern engineers.) This
site quickly explains how the Romans made concrete.
 Roman
Roads: Are you familiar with the expression
"follow the yellow brick road?" The Romans built thousands of miles of
wonderful roads, to connect every part of the empire back to Rome. Up
until about a hundred years ago, people were still using these roads, as
roads! In recent years, instead of building new roads, modern engineers simply
covered many of the old Roman roads with a coat of asphalt. The Romans did
a wonderful job building roads!
To help people find their way, while traveling these roads, the Romans
more or less invented the milestone which grew increasingly wordy, and
increasingly tall, to be easily readable from a vehicle. Some are 6 feet
tall. The milestone usually gave the mileage to the nearest large city, sometimes
to an intermediate place as well; and the date and perhaps who paid for the
road.
There seems to have been no formal traffic code, including what side
of the road to drive on; but there were various laws about what you could
and could not do on a given type and location of road, and when you could
do it. Roads were considerably less crowded, and much less travel than today.
The real danger on a road was ambush by highway robbers, which shows that
a traveling vehicle could be alone on any given stretch of road.
Roman Aqueducts: As cities
grew, the ancient Romans needed more fresh water. To solve this problem,
they built aqueducts. These were massive construction projects.
An aqueduct, properly speaking, is the entire conduit - from fresh water
spring to town. (CONDUIT—A natural or artificial channel through
which fluids may be conveyed).
Where aqueducts had to cross valleys, some were built above ground,
on arches. Most of the time, they were underground conduits, and sometimes
conduits lying right on the ground. These conduits could be made of clay
or wood, covered or encrusted with stone. The pipes inside the conduits,
that carried the water, were made of lead, which in turn required vast mining
enterprises and then transportation to get all this pipe out into the field
all over the empire, although most of the lead was mined in Spain.
What is extraordinary about the aqueducts is the planning that must
have gone into their construction. Since the ancient Romans didn't use
pumps, aqueducts had to be positioned at a relatively constant gradient for
dozens of miles. You try building something that drops by only 100 feet in
40 miles....and you'll begin to understand why scholars refer to the ancient
Romans as such great builders!
Roman Inscriptions: You
may have heard that the ancient Romans could not read or write. Actually,
the ancient Romans wrote quite a bit. Much of their pottery was signed. Very
often, the bricks used to make buildings were stamped with their makers names.
Lead pipes leading to these buildings, by law, were stamped. Scholars have
found 200,000 Latin inscriptions and, incredibly, several thousands are still
being found every year! From a stash of letters written by just plain enlisted
men, preserved by being waterlogged from being dumped in a well in Scotland,
it would appear that some of the Roman army could read and write. Scholarly
estimates are at around 30% of all adult men in Imperial times had the ability
to read and write.
See Also: Free
PowerPoint Presentations about Ancient Rome
Return to Ancient Rome for Kids
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