Ancient Architecture Records

[Eleatic Guest]

I did a fun page over at WP, not a fifth of the records I have in mind listed, but for a start here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_an ... al_records

[Sean Manning]

Nice page! Hopefully it will stay intact for a long time. I have one question: is it a list of world records, or a list of records within the Greco-Roman world? For example, I think the 6th century BCE walls of Babylon were longer than the defenses of Athens (especially if you include the Northern Fortress, river walls, and the defenses of the Etemenaki).

[Eleatic Guest]

To be honest, I have not made my mind up yet. :lol: It is still a beta page. ;-) ) If the city walls of Babylon were indeed longer, they have a fair chance of being the longest overall in history, because the only contender to Athens I found were the 14th century walls of Nanjing which also measure some 30 km.

Generally, the records are not easy to identify since they rarely claimed as such by authors, so I have to do cross comparisons to potential contenders before adding them to the list. Even then, I find some structures quickly superseded such as the highest bridge (probably rather the Alcantara bridge) and the longest spiral stair (possibly the Arcadius column instead). And for other things, which are fairly common knowledge, as the Alexandria lighthouse having been the highest in the world to this day, or the Roman road network being the largest pre-industrial network of prepared and paved overland roads, it is difficult to come by reliable references.

[Sean Manning]

Yeah, I can see there would be problems! At least for records around bridges and roads, you have the advantage that not many cultures produced paved roads or stone bridges.

I may be wrong about Babylon. I just checked my figures from Jona's map of Babylon, and got a perimeter of 18 km including the river walls. Last time I got 36 km, but I think I converted from map scale to real wrong.

Its amazing that a mid-sized town like Athens with a million or two subjects at most was able to build and defend one of the longest city walls in the world!

[Eleatic Guest]

added:
*largest pointed arch bridge by span
*widest bridge