Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Rome’s border walls were the beginning of its end.

Via Wes

Photo: Thamugadi arch, Algeria

Bouncing along a dusty Bavarian logging road, archaeologist Claus-Michael Hüssen keeps his eyes on the tree line to the left, searching for some familiar landmark in the thick forest. Suddenly he pulls the van over and gets out, pausing to pack tobacco into his pipe and consult a 1:50,000-scale survey map.

Head down, pipe in hand, Hüssen—a researcher with the German Archaeological Institute—crosses the road and wades through the thick underbrush. Fifty yards from the road, he nearly misses a low dirt mound about three feet high and six feet across. Littered with flat white stones, it runs in an unnaturally straight line along the forest floor.

Nearly 2,000 years ago this was the line that divided the Roman Empire from the rest of the world.

Here in Germany the low mound is all that’s left of a wall that once stood some ten feet tall, running hundreds of miles under the wary eyes of Roman soldiers in watchtowers.

It would have been a shocking sight in the desolate wilderness, 630 miles north of Rome itself. “The wall here was plastered and painted,” Hüssen says. “Everything was square and precise. The Romans had a definite idea of how things should be.” Engineering students measuring another stretch of wall found one 31-mile section that curved just 36 inches.

2 comments:

  1. "Rome’s border walls were the beginning of its end."
    Hardly. Stupid leftist rag that NG has become. Screw them.

    Build the damn wall along the southern border. Arm it. Put drones over it.

    ReplyDelete