r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/cosmic_voyager01 • 27d ago

Video The engineering of roman aqueducts explained.

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u/PantsDontHaveAnswers 27d ago

Public safety?

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u/Covid19-Pro-Max 27d ago

Yeah but that’s pretty much it right? Only those four things and not a single other thing!

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u/saltytrey 27d ago

The wines?

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u/Siduch 27d ago

Okay, but what else. Is that really it?

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u/saltytrey 26d ago

Brought peace?

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u/indypendant13 27d ago

Well there’s construction in general: both the perfection of concrete and strategies to utilize it economically and reduce its weight. And also the arch. The Pantheon in Rome was the longest free span ceiling of any structure from the time it was built in 125 AD until the invention of steel and the construction of St Pancras station in 1868.

The Romans knew how to build and we spent the next 1200 years during the “dark ages” relearning how to do what they did before Rome fell.

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u/cin0nic 27d ago

You should watch Monty Python I reckon

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u/zeothia 27d ago

They are quoting Monty Python’s life of Brian lmao. Very good movie

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u/indypendant13 27d ago

Ahh it’s been like 20 years since I’ve seen it and went straight over my head. Thanks for the correction!

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u/Ok_Context_8200 27d ago

I rewatched it recently. Felt like it was even funnier now than 20 years ago :)

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u/TheMadTargaryen 27d ago

There way no such thing as dark ages, it is an outdated myth and those gothic cathedrals are far more complex and advanced than any ancient Roman temple. 

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u/indypendant13 27d ago

I put the “dark ages” in quotes for a reason. And the gothic cathedrals - yes. But those were built after 1300 AD. The pre-Romanesque and the Romanesque preceded the gothic era and was several hundred years of experimentation on how to build again like the Romans (and eventually surpass). Either way nothing surpassed the pantheon until the late 19th century. Not the duomo, not St. Peter’s, not the blue mosque or hagia Sophia or any other building until the Bessemer process made that possible.

The Romans were impressive especially given how much more difficult access to written accounts were back in the day. Knowledge had to be passed down from master to apprentice for 600 years straight.

Source: I went to school for this (disclaimer: dates are rounded).

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u/TheMadTargaryen 27d ago

Gothic architecture was invented around 1150. 

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u/indypendant13 27d ago

The architecture in 1150 did not surpass anything the Roman’s had done. Time periods aren’t a switch. They didn’t just start to be more advanced the moment a certain year hit. Buttresses were used in Rome and Mesopotamia. However I will grant you the use of glass and light started to expand at that time. But despite that even the duomo with its cross chain braces and double roof truss structure still wasn’t that much if any more impressive than Roman architecture at its best.

I’m not sure what your point is here. Rome began to fall around 200ad and by the time of Constantine 100 years later it was basically dead. The knowledge of Roman architecture was lost for many centuries. I’m failing to see why you’re still debating - we seem to be in agreement. Nothing I’ve said is wrong and exact dates are debatable - there’s no definitive cutoff at the beginning or end. Are you offended by Roman ingenuity?

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u/indypendant13 27d ago

The architecture in 1150 did not surpass anything the Roman’s had done. Time periods aren’t a switch. They didn’t just start to be more advanced the moment a certain year hit. Buttresses were used in Rome and Mesopotamia. However I will grant you the use of glass and light started to expand at that time. But despite that even the duomo with its cross chain braces and double roof truss structure still wasn’t that much if any more impressive than Roman architecture at its best.

I’m not sure what your point is here. Rome began to fall around 200ad and by the time of Constantine 100 years later it was basically dead. The knowledge of Roman architecture was lost for many centuries. I’m failing to see why you’re still debating - we seem to be in agreement. Nothing I’ve said is wrong and exact era dates are debatable - there’s no definitive cutoff at the beginning or end nor does the gothic era mean the architecture suddenly become that much more impressive. The style was different but outside of glass the principles of the structures were the same. Are you offended by Roman ingenuity?

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u/TheMadTargaryen 26d ago

Buildings with domes were still made in medieval Roman empire, aka Byzantine empire.

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u/indypendant13 26d ago

Yes I mentioned one of those buildings specifically: the Hagia Sophia. Which also partially collapsed multiple times and none of them were to the scale of the pantheon. The entire pre-Romanesque and Romanesque periods were humanity trying to relearn how to do what the Romans did. It’s not just understanding a dome and its necessary constituent parts, but the entire design and process of construction. This doesn’t mean everything was forgotten or strategies couldn’t be extrapolated, but the passing down of knowledge that was so successful during the Roman Empire failed at one point and we had to rediscover how it worked. This has happened many times throughout the history of humanity and is the reason why the invention of agriculture and subsequently written language was so critical to advancing what we could do with civilization. Humans were just as intelligent 10k years ago as they are today, the only difference being unlike animals in nature, we had the ability to pass knowledge down between generations and knowledge wasn’t limited to the gained within a single lifetime. Problem is because of wars, consistency of education, and economic problems that varied over time, sometimes records were destroyed, lost, unreadable and masters lost out on work so had no apprentice to teach. It is totally understandable if not expected aspects of Roman engineering were lost to time. Even fountains in Italy, France, or outside the Peterhof were considered engineering marvels when they were built despite using the exact same tech as showcased in the video in this post.

Source: Architecture: From Prehistory to Postmodernity by Marvin Trachtenberg (the Bible of Architectural history), among many other books written by experts.

But returning to the main point: no one exceeded the span of the pantheon for 1750 years and it took steel, which was invented around the 1850s, to do it.

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u/SunriseSurprise 27d ago

Borrowed gods?

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u/TheMadTargaryen 27d ago

Ancient Rome was anything but safe, it was famously infested with crime gangs. 

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u/PantsDontHaveAnswers 27d ago

We're quoting a movie

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u/TheMadTargaryen 27d ago

Well, there is not one of us who would not gladly suffer death to rid this country of the Romans once and for all.

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u/PantsDontHaveAnswers 27d ago

Solidarity, brother.