Ancient Rome
History
14 rabbit holes · 9 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Where does the word ampersand come from?
- Why does Roman concrete last longer than ours?
- What did the Antikythera mechanism do?
Rabbit holes
- garum: the fermented fish sauce Romans put on everything
Fish guts and salt fermented in the sun for months. Sounds awful, tastes like umami. Southeast Asian fish sauce is a very close relative.
Yuki Tanabe · 5 sources
- a Roman birthday party invitation from 100 AD
Thin wooden tablets found in a waterlogged rubbish dump near Hadrian's Wall. Claudia Severa invites her friend Sulpicia Lepidina to her birthday. One of the earliest known examples of a woman's handwriting in Latin.
Yuki Tanabe · 4 sources
- the Pantheon's dome is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome
Almost 1,900 years old. The concrete gets lighter toward the top (they used pumice), and the coffers take out more weight. And there's just a 9 m hole at the top.
Elena Marchetti · 4 sources
- a Roman hour wasn't always the same length
Jonas Becker · 5 sources
- did lead poisoning bring down Rome?
Matteo Rossi · 4 sources
- Pompeii's graffiti is just people being people
Election ads, insults, love notes, 'I came here and had bread', and a whole lot of people writing their names on walls. Two thousand years and absolutely nothing has changed.
moth · 5 sources
- the map Romans used to plan trips
The Peutinger map distorts geography the same way the tube map does: it only cares about the order of stops and the distances between them.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- gladiators were mostly vegetarian
Bone analysis from a gladiator cemetery at Ephesus showed a diet heavy on barley and beans. They were called 'hordearii', barley men. And they drank a plant-ash drink, probably for calcium.
Yuki Tanabe · 4 sources
- someone listed 210 reasons for the fall of Rome
Demandt's list includes everything from 'barbarization' to 'lead poisoning' to 'excessive bathing'. The real answer is 'it took a long time and it's complicated', which is less fun.
Priya Natarajan · 5 sources
- & used to be recited as the 27th letter of the alphabet
Kids used to recite the alphabet ending in '...X, Y, Z, and per se and', meaning '& by itself is and'. Slurred together that became 'ampersand'. The symbol itself is the letters e and t (Latin 'et') joined into one.
Yuki Tanabe · 4 sources
- Roman concrete heals its own cracks
Maya Rivers · 5 sources
- why roman numerals have no zero
Matteo Rossi · 5 sources
- Derinkuyu: an underground city discovered by a guy renovating his house
1963, a man knocked down a wall in his basement and found a tunnel. It goes about 85 m deep and could hold thousands of people plus livestock. Big stone doors that roll across the passages.
Inês Carvalho · 4 sources
- The Antikythera mechanism
Alistair Grant · 6 sources