Ancient Rome's Road System: The Rise and Fall of Rome

Hello everyone, welcome back to another new episode of megaprojects. This video was brought to you by Surf Shark. Online security is very important. You can protect yourself online with Surfshark. Get 85 off and three months free through the link in the description below. let's get into it because today we're talking about Roman Rhodes, the reason we're doing this one is because we made a video or I made a video about the Roman sanitation

system

and for some reason it worked incredibly well so I thought I could also explore the highway

system

. I actually grew up on what I think is a Roman

road

.

It was incredibly long and straight. I think my parents told me it was a Roman

road

at one point, even though it wasn't, it was very long. And of course, we're talking about that in today's video, so let's jump into the long list of extraordinarily impressive achievements of the Romans, from the mighty Colosseum and Rome's famous healthcare system, both of which we've covered here in megaprojects . Definitely check out those videos of the exquisite pantheon. The Romans certainly knew a thing or two about building, and yet something surprising that is often overlooked does not tower majestically above you, but lies directly beneath your feet.

The Romans built a frankly astonishing 50,000 miles of hard. paved roads throughout his empire, that's enough to go around the earth twice, by the way, but that's just what we could call paved roads. In total, they built an estimated 250,000 miles worth of roads during their time, which included everything from paved roads to simple dirt roads. That's enough to travel to the moon and then go around the moon one and a half times, so yes, there are many paths at its largest point. The Roman Empire was made up of 113 provinces stretching from Egypt to Scotland, from Portugal to Syria, all of which were interconnected. by 372 great roads I'll go into much more detail about all types of roads later, but for now let's call these great roads

ancient

highways, so I know that roads aren't exactly the most impressive achievements of modernity.

Note, but consider that this was made approximately 2000 years ago. Also, the video about Roman sewage isn't particularly revolutionary to the modern mind either, but for some reason you guys really liked it, the Roman travel system that was implemented set the standard for what we use today, from mile markers to the first gas stations, from postal services to primitive motels, all emanated from the eternal city, while the saying all roads lead to Rome has developed a metaphorical meaning, it has a historical basis in its political heyday, 29 separate roads. Radiating from the city of Rome, the Via Epione Happier was built around 312 BC.

C. and was thought to be the first major road leading southeast from Rome to Torrentium (now Toronto) with a total distance of 162 miles, but it was later extended to Brudensium (now) Brindisi, on the Adriatic coast, the road Papillia, measuring some 321 miles, ran from the capital to the Strait of Messina through Calabria, but was not rediscovered until 1844, when a landmark bearing the name of Pulius Pobilius, believed to have been the man who oversaw the project. In northern Italy, the Via Aurelia extended northwest to Genoa, while the Villa Flemish ran north to the Adriatic and the Via Valyria ran east across the peninsula toward Lake Fukunus Conca del Fucino and Sé That I still messed up some of those pronunciations, but it took me like five minutes to finish that sentence is a nightmare.

I'm going to stop there because we could probably make a whole video about these roads, but it would mostly be me yelling about the pronunciations, so let's continue along the Roman roads that were built primarily for military purposes at least in the beginning, when their mighty legions were As they spread across Europe, Africa and East Asia, so did their roads, but as their provinces came under control, the role of roads began to change with trade booming along the routes and in many ways. . It was these roads that united the giant empire in Great Britain. One of the most famous Roman roads, still mainly used today, is Wattling Street, known in Roman times as the unimaginative route two.

The 276-mile route connected the ports of Kent in the south-east with Rock Star near the Welsh border in the west. This had been a dirt road used by the

ancient

Britons before the Romans, but with the invasion of Britain in 43 AD. It received a major paved upgrade and became one of Britain's most important roads. Also the site, although we're not exactly sure where, of the defeat of Boudicca, the iconic British Celtic queen who led a massive revolt against the Romans in AD 60 or 61, a defeat that ultimately broke British resistance to the invaders. Romans. Today the road

fall

s. under various names, such as the imaginative a2 and a5, but sections still retain the Wattling Street name, including a small section running through the City of London.

Now you might assume that these ancient roads would be built somewhat haphazardly and you would be dead wrong, just like our modern standard for roads the Romans had their own set of guidelines for building roads and how to use them and these were included in the 12 tables, the legislation establishing the rights and responsibilities of Roman citizens was to have at least eight Roman feet roads, which is approximately 2.37 meters wide when traveling in a straight line, but twice that width on curves and yes, most Roman roads were straight, but it is a common misconception that they were all straight on the larger public roads, which had heavier traffic, a width of 12 Roman feet, that is, 3.5.

Meters were needed to allow two chariots, each four standard 1.2 meter wide Roman feet, to pass each other while still leaving enough room for pedestrians and if you are wondering if the Roman foot is different from the modern, it definitely is and that is because the modern foot only reached 12 inches in the 12th century under the reign of Henry the First who may have had a 12 inch foot the Roman foot was a little smaller at 11 .6 inches the rights of movement were also quite complex the right to use a road was known as a servitus, while the United States, under the right to go, established the right to use an ita, a footpath that crossed private land in Britain , today we have something similar, the right to Rome, which is covered by the Rights of Way and Countryside Act 2000 essentially. granting the public the right to cross private land generally on marked roads, although there are some exceptions to this law, the eus agendai was the right to drive along an actus carriageway, a standard through a main road that combined both types of server tutez provided it was the appropriate width which, as we mentioned above, was a Roman foot, the Romans were also quite progressive in terms of congestion zones, with the use of carts prohibited in urban areas, except for married women and government officials on business, commercial cars were restricted to nighttime access. within the city or a mile outside the city walls, just like our modern road system, the Romans divided theirs into groups through the public eye.

These were important public roads built and maintained through taxes paid by Roman citizens and usually led to the sea like a city. a river or other road, these were placed under the supervision of a commissioner and repaired by contractors, while all these roads would have been named after their builder, so the via appia, which I mentioned earlier as the first great road, had a builder by the name of In reality, Appia's builders would not have built the roads themselves, but rather would have overseen the entire process through a private eye. These were secondary roads built by individuals and generally led from public roads.

These were generally acquired land, meaning that it had been granted to the owner. and it was up to them whether the public had access or not, but it seems that they usually got it through vicanals. These were local roads that often passed through village districts or crossroads and were often not connected to other roads, they could be public or private, but if built with private funds, they became public once the owner died and just before As we continue with today's video, I'd like to take a moment to tell you about our fantastic sponsor for this episode.

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Going back to the video, the construction of a Roman road was normally a military responsibility and they even came with a military name via mourinho, which is the same one that would have been assigned to a fortification, for example, while the government was responsible for the construction of roads around . In the empire, it was the province that was in charge of maintaining them. Certain local officials known as viaram curators were given the unenviable task of raising funds to repair the roads, this could be done through donations from citizens interested in the road or through generosity which was a format inherited from the ancient Greeks. in which the wealthiest citizens contributed to community projects.

Think of it as a sort of early form of charity or it was done through taxes from the general public. Now technically traveling on the roads was free, but it linked towns and cities. They would have tolls that depended on how you were traveling and if you were carrying goods, how big or expensive they were, as I said before there were set guidelines for the size of the roads but they were actually between 1.1 meters for the most basic dirt road. to 7 meters for the larger roads that sometimes existed in major cities. The Romans had a habit of going up and down hills or mountains, which may have been fine for physically fit legionaries, but would have been a nightmare if not.

They were dragging a chariot, it seems that the Romans began to alter this practice later in the empire, with more zigzag roads appearing on the hillsides. Curves certainly existed on Roman roads, but often a turn was made as sharply as possible, almost at a right angle in order to retain the feeling of directness that the Romans apparently loved if you walked on a Roman road today, It is probably quite bumpy as a result of the wear of the concrete between the stones, but in reality a high-quality Roman road intended to be as flat and smooth as possible, as we do today, did not begin this way.

It was a complex process. A civil engineer first determined approximately where a new road would be placed and was then followed by the surveyor who marked the road. Using metal rods, the buttonhole rodman would place these rods along a line called rigor that designated where the path would go, the civil engineer would then look at the proposed route and order the grameritsy to move the rods when appropriate. necessary, the liberators were the workers. who would plow the surface down to the bedrock, sometimes with the help of legionnaires, this was a process known as fossa, which is the Latin word for ditch, the depth of the ditchIt depended largely on the ground being excavated, but as a rough estimate there would be If there were between 1 and 1.5 metres, the trench was filled with numerous layers, often depending on what was available nearby, the first layer would be small stones followed by rubber or pieces of broken concrete, the third layer would probably have been a fine cement made of crushed pot fragments and lime, the top layer of the road was known as the back and would have been an elliptical surface made of polygons or blocks of square Saxon pepperino travertine or any stone native to the area the blocks that made up the top layer often had their bottom surface cut with grooves so that they gripped the layer beneath it the surface would have been held together using a lime-based mortar used First by the Egyptians about 6000 years ago the top surface was designed to be waterproof like a tortoise shell, so it sloped slightly downward from its highest point in the center, on larger roads and more important, drainage ditches would have been included on both sides of the road next to the crepedo, which was the pavement for pedestrian use, it is difficult to get a good idea of ​​the speed with which these roads were built, but the care that was taken with They meant that they often required little maintenance, if anything, they were often of better quality than what is quickly built today.

The ancient Romans were also excellent bridge builders and provided some of the first large-scale bridges around the world. We recognize the famous arch-shaped stone bridges because they are the ones that have endured, but in reality many bridges would have simply been made. wooden. A study carried out by the Italian Scholatorio Galeazzo in the 1990s counted 931 Roman bridges in 26 different countries, 800 in Europe, 74 in Asia and 57 in Africa, some of which are still in use 2,000 years after their creation. construction. The largest Roman bridge ever built was Trajan's. Bridge that spanned the Danube, although it was only fully operational for 165 years after its completion in 105 AD.

It remained the longest bridge in the world for over a thousand years, with a total length of 1,135 metres. It was made up of 20 masonry pillars and would have been approximately 19 meters high. The practice of mile markers is something that continues in most countries to this day, with the first Roman examples appearing on the road in some moment before 250 BC. C. and in other places before 130 BC. C. the panel at eye level would have shown the The mileage from that place to the Roman forum, as well as all the information about the builder's milestones, were circular or rectangular columns and usually sank 0.61 meters on the ground, but they were at least 1.5 meters high.

The modern word mile originated from the Latin miller parson. which meant 1,000 steps and although our modern format for road signs has changed slightly the basic idea remains the same what good is an amazing road system if you don't know where you are going it is highly unlikely that many travelers would have done so could have used a real map since they were rare and incredibly expensive, instead they would have consulted an itinerary from which we get the modern word itinerary. This was often a basic list of villagers' towns and cities along a route with their approximate distances in 44 BC.

Julius Caesar commissioned the first major road itinerary to describe the vast network of roads within his empire. Three Greek geographers were hired to survey the network, a process that took them an extraordinary 25 years to complete, by which time Julius Caesar was gone. The itinerary etched in stone. It was located near the pantheon in Rome, where travelers and map sellers could make copies of it. Mansions or places of stay were early government-maintained weigh stations along highways, usually located 16 to 19 miles away. Mansions were generally just places to sleep. but cowponet inns where refreshments could be found were usually nearby.

If the tales are true, the mansions did not have the best reputation and were often considered a good place to get mugged or find a prostitute or perhaps both in the early days of Roman Streets, when services were still in their infancy, According to the laws, nearby houses were to offer hospitality, these types of houses eventually became tabernacles, from which we get the modern word tavern, and again their reputation tended to be less than squeaky clean, but more so. Over time these grew rapidly and many towns and cities we have today grew up around an original tabernacle complex, two of the largest examples are found in the Rhineland and in addition the ancient Roman roads also saw one of the first forms of Roman postal service.

It used two services, one for public use and the other for private use, the curses publicus founded by the emperor Augustus carried the mail in relays along the Roman road system. As a very rough estimate, mail would be transported along the routes at a rate of 38 to 62 miles per day. although just like today, if you have the money, things could be speeded up significantly with a lone passenger in 193, a deal, a letter arrived by postal service to alexandria, egypt, from

rome

, a distance of about 2485 miles and was recorded which took 63 days to reach its destination, while its roads certainly allowed the Romans to quickly build an empire, it was also what contributed to their down

fall

.

Enemy soldiers could use the roads just as legionaries did and when Rome began to falter, their adversaries could reach their towns and cities using the same roads that Rome had used to defeat them in 476 AD. Rome was again sacked and the emperor was deposed. What had once been the largest empire the world had known crumbled, but while the military presence no longer existed, the influence of Roman transportation has disappeared. The remaining monuments may have been torn down when the oppressed finally freed themselves from the yoke of Roman rule, but their paths and indeed their system of use have endured long after, so I really hope you found the video interesting, If so, please press that thumb. button above below and don't forget to subscribe to new videos like this several times a week and check out our fantastic Surf Shark Sponsor Special Offer link below, thanks for watching.