| Transcript |
| 0:00 | · | I'm Garrett Ryan, and this |
| 0:04 | · | is the short answer. Today's question is: "Why is Ancient Rome buried?" |
| 0:12 | · | As everybody knows, ancient Rome is deep underground. |
| 0:17 | · | Take, for example, the Curia in the Forum, an ancient building converted into a church in |
| 0:22 | · | late antiquity. By the middle ages, the ground level had risen so much |
| 0:28 | · | that a new door had to be cut into the wall, ten feet or three meters above the original. |
| 0:35 | · | The ground level continued to rise, and during the Renaissance |
| 0:39 | · | another door had to be cut, this time more than 20 feet, or 6 meters, above the ancient pavement. |
| 0:46 | · | The difference between ancient and later ground levels is equally obvious |
| 0:50 | · | in the nearby Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, where the door of the church that was built |
| 0:55 | · | into the temple during the Renaissance is two stories above the ancient street. |
| 1:00 | · | So where did all that soil come from? |
| 1:04 | · | One humble but hardworking cause was windblown dust and weeds. |
| 1:09 | · | In a temperate climate like Rome's, plants take root on the roofs and walls of untended buildings. |
| 1:16 | · | If you look at a modern building that's been abandoned for a couple decades, |
| 1:20 | · | like Detroit's Packard Plant, which is shown here, you can already see vegetation – and even |
| 1:24 | · | full-size trees – sprouting from every surface. Before they were cleaned in the nineteenth |
| 1:30 | · | century, Rome's ruins had similar rooftop forests, as this painting of the Colosseum illustrates. |
| 1:38 | · | The soil produced by the lives and deaths of these urban jungles built up slowly but |
| 1:42 | · | steadily - under favorable conditions, perhaps an inch or a couple centimeters every century. |
| 1:48 | · | Plants, however, accounted only for a small fraction of the rise in Rome's street level. |
| 1:54 | · | Until the Tiber embankments were constructed in the nineteenth century, Rome was prone to |
| 1:59 | · | serious floods, which sometimes rose as high as 15 feet or five meters above the street level in |
| 2:05 | · | the vicinity of the Pantheon. When the water receded, it often left thick layers of silt. |
| 2:13 | · | Built-up trash also contributed to the rise of Rome's streets. |
| 2:18 | · | Far and away the greatest culprit, however, was debris from ruined buildings. |
| 2:24 | · | In a typical Roman apartment building, three or four stories tall, the outer walls were |
| 2:28 | · | brick-faced concrete and the roof was tiled. But almost all the rest was wood. Once the building |
| 2:35 | · | was abandoned, all that wood decayed, creating a waist-deep heap inside the masonry shell. |
| 2:39 | · | And once rain and frost weakened the mortar, and earthquakes brought the walls crashing down, |
| 2:44 | · | there would be a grass-covered mound, a story or so tall, on the site of our apartment building. |
| 2:50 | · | In the case of a large building, that mound might be the size of a hill. The medieval |
| 2:56 | · | inhabitants of Rome scavenged bits of stone from these piles, but they had no use for broken tile |
| 3:02 | · | or hunks of concrete. So they simply ignored the rubble, or levelled it and built on top of it. |
| 3:10 | · | And that, my friends, is the short answer: Rome was buried by its own rubble and trash, |
| 3:15 | · | by river mud, and by a little bit…of dust in the wind. |
| 3:21 | · | If you have a question about the Greeks and Romans that you'd like to have answered in a few minutes, |
| 3:25 | · | please let me know in the comments or email me at toldinstone@gmail |
| 3:28 | · | In the meantime, stay tuned for my longer videos, which publish on Fridays, and thanks for watching. |
