Walk inside and ascend Trajan's Column

YouTube ^ | August 14, 2023 | Darius Arya Digs

[SunkenCiv]

Take a unique walk inside one of the best preserved monuments of ancient Rome: Trajan's Column. Ascend the spiral staircase- rarely open to the public- to the top viewing platform for a one-of-a-kind view of Ancient Rome, and learn about the construction and meaning of this funerary monument that narrates the battles against the Dacians (modern Romania).

Walk inside and ascend Trajan's Column | 8:22
Darius Arya Digs | 28.1K subscribers | 127,903 views | August 14, 2023

[SunkenCiv]

Mysterious machines, dragons, skulls on spikes...there's a lot going on in the details of Trajan's Column at Rome.

The Strangest Scenes on Trajan's Column | 5:42
Toldinstone Footnotes | 37.1K subscribers | 1,058,367 views | October 13, 2023

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At Rome's E.U.R., the Museum of Roman Civilization has no actual artifacts, but it does have dozens of rooms full of plaster casts and models which illustrate the greatness of classical Rome. The highlight is a plaster model of Trajan's Column sliced up and laid out so you can actually see the scenes. The original is one of the first great examples of "continuous narration" — when a relief is carved into a column as if winding a scroll around and around a huge pillar.

Trajan's Column Unrolled | 1:55
Rick Steves' Europe | 1.84M subscribers | 20,620 views | May 31, 2013

[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]

[BenLurkin]

Top pic looks a bit like one of those rolling irrigation systems. Maybe he was draining a swamp?

[BenLurkin]

[TexasGator]

“Maybe he was draining a swamp?”

Nope. They took down a hill.

[SunkenCiv]

Dunno.

The logistics of the campaign were impressive. The remnants of Trajan’s bridge over the Danube are mostly gone now, dynamited in modern times for navigation purposes.

Basically, he used an expensive campaign to take over the gold mining that had been going since the Neolithic, province a rich area, and finance his final success.

His last project was kicking the crap out of the Parthians, taking their capital, and extending the Roman Empire to the Persian Gulf.

His pedophile adopted son Hadrian pulled out (ahem) of Mesopotamia and had to be talked out of withdrawing (well!) from Dacia, the region commemorated on Trajan’s column.

Hadrian’s best known for the Wall by that name, but he also had a catamite that drowned in the Nile. Hadrian was so upset by this loss that he had his butt buddy deified, built shrines to him all over the Empire, and built a non-viable city on the site of the drowning, naming it Antinoos after the dead guy.

The Via Hadrianus was constructed from the city across the rugged desert terrain to the Red Sea, in an attempt to give it some kind of economic life (that failed). When the Via Hadrianus was mapped and surveyed, even the water stops were found mostly intact, and it became apparent that it was likely that the only people who ever used the route were the ones who’d built it for him.

[Paal Gulli]

Didn’t he invade Dacia to raid their gold mines to finance the building of Trajan’s Forum, an eternal monument to himself?

[SunkenCiv]

No, but that was one of the things that was financed that way. The project (or some kind of project) had been begun by Domitian, but Trajan constructed a couple of large public markets, what most urban and suburban places in the US call ‘farmers markets’. We can’t know now, but these kinds of projects in ancient Rome probably served as urban renewal.