When it comes to the cornerstone of Roman culture, we have to mention the Greek and Etruscan civilizations, the two ancient Mediterranean civilizations have a profound impact on the formation of Roman culture, the Greeks brought the Romans religion, art and culture, philosophy, and social thinking, until today the Greeks still retain their own writing and language, the influence of Greek culture is so strong that even the Roman Empire's Eastern inheritors in the Middle Ages finally changed to Greek as the official language of the empire, and the two civilizations of the Hiroshi Dynasty have been running in history for thousands of years. A large Greco-Roman cultural circle was formed.
Compared with the Greeks, the Etruscan culture seems to be unheard, and the last Etruscan dictionary compiled by the Roman Emperor Claudius has long been lost, resulting in today's linguists still unable to decipher the Etruscan records and steles, almost all the historical records of the Etruscans are derived from the descriptions of the Greeks and Romans, and the Etruscan culture died out in the long history very early, and it seems that it did not leave its own footprints in later generations.
Although the Etruscan culture has long since disappeared, they still left their cultural genes in the Roman culture, such as the Latin alphabet - improved from the Greek alphabet by the Etruscans, the traditional entertainment gladiatorial competition of the Etruscans also made Rome popular for hundreds of years, and the construction method that influenced the history of Western architecture for thousands of years - the arch structure.
What is an arch circle
arch is derived from Latin, and at the same time is a single word is also the root, in addition to the meaning of arc, arch, the word architecture (architecture, architecture, structure), architect (architect) is to arch as its root, it can be seen that the arch circle occupies a very important position in the history of Roman architecture, in addition to arch also has the meaning of primary, ancient, dominant, etc., this meaning comes from the word archer of archer, In archer, arch means arc, and in ancient times, people who were good at using bows and arrows were often regarded as powerful hunters and leaders, so arch also became the root of many political words, such as oligarchy, patriarch, and so on.
The arch circle is a form of architecture, and the arch and the circle can be explained separately, the circle is the abbreviation of the circle, the law bond, the coupon hole, is a kind of construction method in architecture, the circle is made of plural building materials in accordance with the arc way to pile up, and the cylindrical structure composed of the plural circle is called the arch, in a more intuitive explanation, the circle is a pair of left and right ribs, and the chest cavity composed of 12 pairs of ribs is the arch.
In building mechanics, the arch ring is the use of pressure, compressive stress and thrust to support the building itself, because the pressure is the basis of the support arch structure, so in the lack of reinforced concrete in the era, the arch structure can not support its own weight before the keystone is placed, so the ancient architects will first follow the original arc of the arch ring in the construction process, and create a mold called arch mold (archcentring) with wood material. The arch formwork will be supported on the lower edge of the stone arch circle, and the construction workers will pile the stone upwards according to the arc of the arch formwork until the structure is stable.
The mechanical structure of the arch and the composition of the arch formwork
Domes, domes and other architectural structures also belong to the extension of the arch structure, the dome also developed from the early stacked dome, similar to the structure of the stacked arch, the ancients found very early that if the plural circle is surrounded by concentric circles, you can get a ** high and spacious internal space, the stacked dome was used as early as the Mycenaean era, and the real dome can be traced back to Mesopotamia before 3000 BC, the local people will use fired mud bricks to build a small dome for the general house.
MycenaeTreasury of Atreus
The origin of the arch circle
Every spring, the high mountain snowmelt of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers washes the fertile soil of the Anatolian plateau into the Mesopotamian plains, which allow the Mesopotamian plains to maintain the fertility of the soil after each year of cultivation. Mesopotamian architects were unable to construct huge column-and-beam buildings from huge limestone and granite as Egypt did, so the two river civilizations went in two different directions in terms of architectural construction.
The city-states of the Two Rivers Valley lacked stone and wood for the construction of buildings, and they could only rely on mud bricks to build the city-state's walls, temples and palaces, and the large buildings in early Mesopotamia must have been built on platforms, and then used mud bricks to pile up heavy walls, due to the lack of stone and wood and other supports, the beam and column structure was almost useless in the Two Rivers area, so most of the temples of the city-states such as your and Akkad were presented in a heavy wall, small opening, square and stepped manner.
Left: Ziggurat in your, right: Karnak Temple in Egypt
In the case of Egypt, Egypt is rich in limestone, granite and syenite and other suitable rock slabs, which allowed Egypt to develop huge rock pillars and various statues of gods, and Egypt has had a profound impact on the development of pillars on the Aegean peoples. On the contrary, Mesopotamian buildings are mostly made of bricks, and more attention is paid to the stability of the wall structure in the architectural structure, but the building only has walls that cannot be passed, if it is just a general small gate, in the construction of the city's city gates, palace gates and other huge span buildings, the lack of huge rock time as a beam, forced the inhabitants of Mesopotamia to find a way to overcome this problem with bricks, so that the arch structure can develop under such geographical conditions.
Ishtar Gate of BabylonImagineFig
The earliest arch evolved from a structure called corbelarch, corbel is a kind of building bricklaying method, simply put, the bricks are slowly stacked upwards in a specific direction, so that the building can be gradually retracted or expanded outward, if the form of stacking the left and right stacks of bricks upwards and gradually closing is called the stacking arch, the stacking arch is also known as the false arch, it is a pure pressure structure, which can be applied to gates, drainage channels and other buildings. The development of the arch was quite early, and it is distributed all over the world, and traces of the arch can be found in the Mayan city-state buildings of ancient Egypt, Mycenae, India, Indochina and even the Yukatun Peninsula.
True arch (Left) & Stacked Arch (right), right, the Lion Gate in Mycenae
YiTruriAsia
The Etruscan civilization was born in the Tuscany region of present-day Italy, and the ancient Greeks called it Etruria (Etruria is renamed Etruria in this text), this mysterious people of unknown origin established a series of city-states in the north-central part of the Italian peninsula, and today's important cities in central Italy such as Firenze, Siena, and Pisa have developed since the Etruscan eraEtruscan as a trade city-state civilization, their cargo ships shuttled back and forth throughout the Mediterranean, while doing business, they also introduced the advanced culture of the Mediterranean into the Italian peninsula, first of all, writing, Etruscan introduced Greek into the Italian peninsula, transforming it into the well-known Latin alphabet, and then myths and legends followed, they introduced the Greek mythological system into Italy and mixed the Egyptian view of the afterlife and the local priestly tradition in Italy.
The Etruscans were present at their peakThe whole northItaly
The Etruscans built many culverts and sewers for the city, built aqueducts to bring water to the city to ensure that the water supply was secure, and the use of paved roads and strong bridges between cities made traffic smoother, and the Etruscans' spirit of attaching importance to public construction greatly influenced the Roman concept of urban planning. If the philosophical thinking and cultural life of the Romans were inherited from the Greeks, then their personality of attaching importance to practicality and public construction was inherited from the inhabitants of Etruscan.
The most characteristic architectural type of Etruscan is the arch, for the Etruscan people to use the arch, there is a saying that they originated in Asia Minor, with the process of migration also brought the tradition of the arch of their hometown to the Italian peninsula, no matter how historians speculate, it is undeniable that the Etruscans were the first people in European history to use the arch on a large scale to build cities, and the difference between them and the Mesopotamian ancestors is that Italy is not short of rock materials, so they do not use mud bricks, Instead, it was built using stone bricks made of volcanic rock, which is common in Italy, as well as travertine.
ItalyThe Etruscan arch of Perugia , isAt present, only two remainDown one of the Etruscan gates
The Etruscans were almost assimilated by the Romans in the middle of the Republic after being incorporated into the Roman League, and the original Etruscan city construction and expansion were taken over by the Romans, so most of the architectural remains of Etruscan itself disappeared, and only a few mausoleums, temple foundations, walls and gates remained, but the Roman architectural system still inherited many traditional Etruscan characteristics, in addition to the arch structure, the common patio space (atrium) in Roman dwellings, The Tuscanorder of the Five Great Pillars, the temple pattern with a strong emphasis on the front rather than the sides, etc.
Left GreeceHewysThe Temple of Hephaestus, on the right is the Etruscan temple that historians have restored according to the description of the Roman engineer Vitruvius, the Greeks would add columns even to small temples on all sides, while the Romans basically inherited the Etruscan architectural form, surrounded only by walls on the sides and back.
Five pillars
Although it is completely different from the structure of the arch, it is still common to talk about the five pillars of Greco-Roman architecture, which are the Doric Order, the Ionian Order, the Corinthian Order, the Tuscan Order and the Composite Order, the first three columns are from Greece and the last two are from Italy. The Toscan column is an Etruscan adaptation of the Doric column, and its width to height ratio still maintains a 1:7 ratio, but with new bases and simplified inscriptions, while the composite column was created by the Romans, this column is a mixture of Corinthian column fern leaf carvings blended with the left and right swirls of the Ionic style.
Greco-Roman architecture is built in five columns, from left to right: Tuscan, Doric, Ionian, Corinthian and Complex
Romans with arch circles
20th century Italian architect Bruno. Brunozevi once said: Before the construction of the Pantheon in Rome, human beings never built a real internal space, the ancient Orientals and Egyptians built many giant pillars and stone forests, even in the time of the Greeks to anthropomorphize the pillars still could not change the fact that space was ignored, the ancients were afraid of space, and the sign of that era was the towering boulders...And useless boulders.
Modern architects such as the Franks. Roy. Franklloyd Wright, Italian architect Bruno. Brunozevi has denied the spatiality of Greek architecture, they believe that Greek architecture is not so much architecture, but closer to sculpture, the Greeks are very good at creating symmetrical and elegant proportions, visually the Greeks have no one to match the harmony, but when entering the inner sanctum of the building, the internal space of the Greek temple is hidden and scarce, it is neither a gathering place for believers, nor does it have any social function, and the real functional space is the open space outside the temple, and the steps, This spatial ignorance remained unchanged until the decline of Greek civilization.
The Colosseum, which uses a large number of arches to support the stacked auditorium, can also be seen here in the circle column invented by the Romans, that is, the front of the arch is decorated with a Greek column appearance to achieve an aesthetic and practical effect
If the architecture of ancient Egypt and the Greeks is ignorant of the internal space, then the Romans can get out of this quagmire is the arch circle, I believe that most historians and architects will not deny the engineering ability of the Romans, before the appearance of reinforced concrete in the 19th century, if people want to build a large-scale space, they must rely on the arch circle and the vault, in addition to the traditional arch bridge, arch, the achievement of the Romans is to use the arch structure to build a large internal space of public space such as baths, theaters, Basilica (court), etc., the arch structure technology in Europe can be said to have laid all the foundations in the Roman era, and hundreds of years after the end of the classical era and the fall of the Roman Empire, the structure of Byzantine architecture and Romanesque architecture that was gradually revived in European countries was developed with reference to the basic development of the Roman era.
The evolution of the vault architecture in Rome is from left to right, and the order is the law circle, the arch (cylinder arch), and the cross arch
Postscript
Octavian, the first Augustus of the Roman Empire, once said that when I arrived, Rome was nothing more than a city made of bricks, but when I left, I would be left with a city made of marble. The arch structure is simple compared to the three pillars of the Greeks, but if human beings did not take advantage of the characteristics of the arch, it would not be possible to build such a huge span of internal space as the Pantheon in Rome and the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, let alone the largest dome in human history - the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence.
With the maturity of the reinforced concrete structure of modern buildings, the arch structure gradually fades out of the category of general buildings, and most of the modern only large bridges can see similar structures, but perhaps the dome and arch have been used to construct conceptual buildings since ancient times, so until now the new religious buildings, mansions and monumental buildings can see their traces, maybe people's admiration for the sky has long become the nature engraved in the genes, right?
LeftVitruvius, an engineer at the end of the Roman Republic, whose book Ten Books of Architecture became a guide to reviving classical art during the Renaissance, rightDa Vinci painted the so-called perfect proportions of Vitruvian according to Vitruvius's description of the ** proportion in the Ten Books of Architecture(vitruvian man)
From left to right, RomePantheon(pantheon), FlorenceCathedral of Our Lady of Fiore(florence cathedral), Istanbul (Constantinople).Hagia Sophia(hagia sophia)