Great Names in History

In old Rome buildings collapsed all the time.  They were too tall for their base and the walls were too thin.  Hear that distant rumble?  That’s another rickety building going down somewhere in the City.

According to a census of buildings made at the time of Septimius Severus the usual city block (insula) was around 300 square meters—hardly broad enough to carry a structure twenty meters high, which was a typical height by then—three or four stories of shaky construction.   Greedy builders found ways of thinning the walls by adding rows of bricks to strengthen the concrete or the adobe; and they kept pushing skyward.

The poet Juvenal lived in a tipsy third-floor apartment but he had neighbors who had to climb higher to reach home. “Who at cool Praeneste, or at Volsinii amid its leafy hills,” he whined,” was ever afraid of his house tumbling down?….But here we inhabit a city propped up for the most part by slats: for that is how the landlord patches up the crack in the old wall, asking the boarders to sleep peacefully under the ruin that hangs above their heads.”

Augustus was so alarmed by the frequent collapse of buildings that he issued an edict forbidding private citizens to construct an edifice higher than twenty meters.  But buildings kept growing tall and keeling over.  A hundred year later Trajan in desperation tried reducing the legal height to eighteen meters but he could not buck the greedy builders or the need for more housing.

By the fourth century Rome was world-famous for her tall buildings—many were five and six stories high.

And one skyscraper towered above them all: the legendary INSULA OF FECULA. That monstrosity was an apartment building so tall that it became a  tourist attraction, like Trajan’s Column and the Pantheon.  No one knows just how tall it was or how it met its end.  Maybe a storming Visigoth toppled it with a swat of his sword.

..

I was puzzled by what the old Greek historian Herodotus wrote on the construction of the Great Pyramid.

He visited Egypt in about 450 BC and talked with the old priests there and heard their account of the construction of the pyramids. That was at least a thousand years after Pharoah Cheops had built his pyramid but it is the oldest account that has come down to us and has to be taken pretty seriously. Those stones weighed about two and a half tons and were transported for miles after they were quarried, by barge and then over land. How?

The Great Pyramid didn’t look then like it does now. It wasn’t a pile of steps but a perfect geometrical pyramid that shone in the sun. It was polished. After the big building blocks were set up as we see them today, they were covered with a layer of flat slabs and polished till they shone.
Herodotus had known that. What he hadn’t known, and what surprised him, was what he learned about the road the Egyptian engineers had built for hauling the stones to the construction site. IT TOO WAS POLISHED!

“For ten years the people were afflicted in making the road whereon the stones were dragged, the making of which road was to my thinking a task only a little lighter than the building of the pyramid, for the road is five furlongs long and ten fathoms broad, and raised at its highest to a height of eight fathoms, and it is all of stone polished and carved with figures. Those ten years went to the making of this road and of the underground chambers of the hill the pyramids stand on….” (Herodotus, pp. 425-426 Loeb Classical Library, translated by A.D.Godley)

Now, I had seen how men moved blocks in a stoneyard and I assumed that the Egyptians had done the same: that they hadn’t dragged those big blocks of theirs but used rollers and planks. The problem I saw was the rollers. Probably, though not surely, the huge stones would have crushed wooden rollers or logs. And I wasn’t even sure if bronze rollers could take that weight without being flattened. Later I learned that the Bronze Age hadn’t yet begun at the time of the building—that only copper instruments were used—so I had to throw out the idea of metal rollers altogether.

Then I read Herodotus and got the surprise, the same as he had. Why had they polished the road to the pyramid? It couldn’t be that they dragged the stones over that polished avenue—that they polished thousands of square feet of pavement with the aim of smoothing the dragging of the blocks—to reduce friction. Anyone, at any stage of human inventions, can see that to reduce friction you have to get the stone OFF the ground, not polish the ground. And if they used rollers of some kind and planks, the smooth surface of the road would actually hinder the hauling. You wouldn’t want the planks on the ground to slide around but stay put while the stone rolled over them. And how could the poor slaves and oxen that pulled the stones get a firm foothold on that slippery road?

But Herodotus seems not to have thought of the problem. What awed him was the vastness of the project and the results. Perhaps he took for granted what I discovered later while reading a modern study of the pyramids: that the Egyptians, like the people who carried the boulders to Stonehenge, must have hauled their stones ON SLEDS. That is how they reduced the drag and pulled their stones down that polished avenue. Only the tracks of the sleds were in contact with the pavement and its smoothness did make the pulling easier.

Yet then wasn’t the polish unnecessary? Wasn’t it still an impediment to the pulling? The men and oxen would slide all over the place unless they worked off the polished road, to one side of the stone. They would pull a little left and right of the block, the way mules used to pull barges on canals from the paths along the banks. But the road—ten “fathoms” wide—was no dinky canal or creek, so pulling from its shoulder or berm would have meant doing so at a great angle, thus losing effectiveness.

I re-read my Herodotus and found the solution:
“Cheops compelled all the Egyptians to work for him, appointing to some to drag the stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountains to the Nile: and the stones being carried across the river in boats, others were charged to receive and drag them to the mountains called Lybian.” Ibid., p.425

I realized that the polished road leading up to the Great Pyramid was only the last bit of work, the last “mile”. The real feat was bringing—dragging—those blocks up and down the mountains, where the roads were surely not polished or even paved. If the workmen were able to perform that feat, using sleds or any other means, they had solved the problem of transporting big stones. Without polishing their roads until they were slippery.

Conclusion: the broad avenue leading up to the Great Pyramid was polished after the blocks were hauled through on sleds, just as they had been hauled for hundreds of miles on other, worse roads. The polish Herodotus saw on that road had nothing to do with reducing friction: it was there as part of the vast general design and meant to dazzle.

See Egyptologist Mark Lehner’s theory that the great blocks were quarried not in the mountains but right at the foot of the Pyramid.

..

At Appomatox, at the end of the American Civil War, the surrender of the Southern armies was unconditional.  There was no question of any terms.  Yet General Lee made two requests: that his officers be allowed to keep their swords; and that the farmers be allowed to keep their horses.

Grant in his memoirs doesn´t say if he was expecting these requests.  But he immediately understood their purpose and granted them.  They weren´t concessions; they weren´t even favors.  They were measures of sound common sense and leadership.  The swords the officers would keep were their dignity.  And the horses would be needed to get the men back to work, to re-build the ruined farms and countryside.
It was then spring.  There was still time to plow the fields and get a crop growing.  This was urgent.  Without that year´s cereals there would be certain starvation in the South by winter.

When the Spanish Civil War ended (1939) there were no Republican generals around to surrender the armies and to make requests.  They had all fled to France and Portugal.  Honor and dignity were still around as a crutch to help men through the horrors of twentieth-century war, and to lean on while facing the firing squad when the war was over.  But they were a luxury from another age, not this one.

There was no dramatic surrender scene but the problems facing the country were the same. Tens of thousands of men had nothing to do and no food for themselves and their families.  Spain had never had much industry.  She couldn´t simply switch on the heavy machinery and start producing again.  There was no machinery.  She was an agricultural country with her fields in ruins.  Grain shipped in from Argentina saved thousands from starvation.  That was all the help there was.  From the United States there was nothing and there would be nothing for twenty years.  The Marshall Plan bypassed Spain.

Franco decided on a surprising government project to employ thousands of men: a mausoleum. It was to stand as a monument to his victory and as a tomb for himself and the soldiers of both sides who died in the war.
The country had no cash and its natural resources were used up.  Traditional projects such as dams and roads were out of the question because even cement was scarce.  A tomb, a kind of tunnel in a mountain, was probably the cheapest of Franco´s options. There were few overhead costs.  No steel was required, no heavy machinery—not even cement.  All the stone that was needed would be quarried in the mountains and hauled to the site of the great mausoleum.  They would be cut to size and lifted like the stones of the pyramids.   Most of the work would consist in chipping away a chamber under the mountain—a kind of negative sculpture.

And so thousands of men hammered away at the mountain and at the roads to the mountain—maybe more stone workmen than had been assembled since ancient times. They were full of ill-will.  The huge camps they lived in had the air of prison camps because of the post-war repression.  Most of the men had been on the losing side and were stained with guilt.  Trials and executions were going on at the time and there were rumors of murders and score-settling.  And the firm establishment of Franco´s reign made their future look very bleak.

The Valle de los Caídos, in the mountains near Madrid. The building complex is a Benedictine monastery

..