For all their science, the Greeks never advanced beyond the column and lintel-which meant that even the elegant Greek temples were of primative design-and they needed columns everywhere. The Romans invented the arch-this made long stone bridges, aqueducts, and buildings with open interiors possible. Surely the Greek mathematicians must have noticed the advantage of the arch-why didn’t they use them?
Perhaps the centralized Roman government had a greater capacity to organize and direct large-scale public works projects?
It had nothing to dow ith public works. At least, not directly.
First, the Romans had an interest in very large and dramatic structures, so they needed something like an arch. Many of these were private. Second, they improved methods of creating arches.
As far as your first point goes, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks all had the same interest, so that is totally meaningless in determining why the Romans were mass users of something the Greeks and Babylonians knew about before the Romans started mass producing them.
As for your second point, I’ll ask the iconic question, “Cite?”
Maybe the arch was just not in their aesthetic. What large structures did the Greeks build besides their temples? Not an expert, but I believe the Greeks had definite ideas about what was beautiful and proper in their structures; maybe they just weren’t interested in seeing arches.
Jesus fucking Christ. It’s because they did not invent the arch. They also did not invent the microprocessor nor the atomic bomb nor the mechanical printing press. Inventions just happen within the constraints of available technology or need or raw fucking luck or some brilliant person.
The masturbatory habits of the Son of God aside, the arch doesn’t exactly require knowledge of quantum mechanics, and the Greeks were, over all, clever guys. If they had been trying to efficiently enclose large spaces I’m sure they would have hit on that design element pretty quickly.
So here we are and it’s a good and classic question, and no one really has any idea yet, right?
I don’t either.
C’mon you Dopers! You’re smarter than us! Right?
Yes, sometimes one fails to invent something because they didn’t have the luck to think of the idea.
But other times, when the reason is, as you say, “constraints of available technology”, we can identify the missing element. For example, my understanding is that Western Civilization peoples did not invent the wheel, in large party because they had no pack animals which would have made the wheel useful.
Both the Greeks and Romans built large buildings and had similar needs. So why did the Romans come up with the arch but the Greeks didn’t? I think the OP may be asking if it was just luck, or maybe there was a specific thing which the Romans had - but the Greeks lacked - which enabled the Romans to come up with the idea.
Okay, y’all. We’ve already established two things:
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The Romans did NOT invent the arch. They simply took it from the Mesopotamians and put it to use. Liberally.
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The Greeks knew of the arch, they simply didn’t put it into practice themselves.
To recap: it ain’t that the Greeks didn’t know about it (they did, though perhaps after they built most of their grand structures), and it ain’t that the Romans invented it (they didn’t).
How about the ancient Egyptians? They never got past the post-and-lintel stage either. take the impressive Temple of Karnak- there were so many columns (necessary in view of the weakness of stone lintels) that there was hardly any interior space.
To me, the arch is such a natural shape-surely the Greeks (who were the masters of geometry) must have thought about it.
But I agree, a Greek temple would not look very nice, if constructed using arches-imahine the Acropolis with arches!
WAG: The Greeks didn’t want their buildings to look like sewers? (In their eyes, anyway.)
The oldest Greek temples were made of wood, which has useful tensile strength and naturally lends itself to column-and lintel construction. When the wooden temples were replaced by stone, the Greeks wanted to retain the appearance of the original wooden construction so they simply replaced the wooden beams with stone despite the fact that stone is not ideal for this type of construction. (Many of the lintels on the Parthenon are cracked because their lower faces have been unable to resist the tensile stresses.)
Evidence that the Greeks simply wanted to copy the wooden originals - they carved the simulated ends of wooden joinery pegs into the stone lintels.
Maybe they thought about it but the thinkers never bothered to tell the architects.
No, seriously, some of the great thinkers in ancient Greece apparently had some funny ideas about keeping their science pure and didn’t want to taint it with vulgar things like practical applications :eek:
Nearly all ancient builders were aware of the arch–including the Etruscans, who transmitted so much advanced culture to the early Romans–so it’s a misnomer to say the Romans “invented” the arch. Instead, I’d ask why the Romans use it so much more frequently in their architecture.
A pure guess: The aqueduct was the most widely-visible symbol of Roman building in the ancient world. Aqueducts were one of the first structures built whenever the Romans arrived and often ran for miles thru the countryside. Using arches to construct elevated aqueducts made practical sense (similar structures were used for water drainage by other civilizations), and their ubiquity made them seem the “right” style for Roman building in general.
The Rmans had the odd habit of making huge structures of public service. This was a method for wealthy patrons to buil support among the lower classes. Furthermore, they had vastly greater need for large publci structures than any civilization before them. The Greeks and Babylonians built temples and palaces. The Romans built those, but also greatly improved waterways and roads and public spaces with meeting halls, arenas, and plazas. All of these (even roads and plazas) often had a need that arches filled more satifactorily than columns.
Fine. This is common knowledge to many gradeschoolers.
“The Roman arch is semicircular, and built from an odd number of arch bricks (called voussoirs). An odd number of bricks is required for there to be a capstone or keystone, the topmost stone in the arch. The Roman arch’s shape is the simplest to build, but not the strongest. There is a tendency for the sides to bulge outwards, which must be counteracted by an added weight of masonry to push them inwards. The Romans used this type of semicircular arch freely in many of their secular structures such as aqueducts, palaces and amphitheaters.[citation needed”
They also developed the pointed arch (though here in the sense of “across the Roman empire”, although that was not so common.
I’m not sure if you’d consider it before or after the Post-and-lintel stage but the Egyptians also used the corbeled arch, although it’s not a true arch.
I think you meant to write “Western hemisphere” here.
There is nothing in your citation that states that the Roman arch was somehow an “improved method of creating arches,” which was what I asked you to provide a citation for. :dubious:
I think you are running into some chicken-egg difficulties here. The use of arches in aqueducts, for example, would have occurred not because they needed aqueducts, and therefore decided to use arches, but rather they knew about the arch and applied it to produce aqueducts. Lots of Mediterranean civilizations did these things. Further, the Etruscans, who used the arch (and from whom the Romans learned the arch) were using it despite not littering their cities with huge numbers of arched structures (at least, not that have survived).
Your theory sounds like after-the-fact rationalization. Romans had no more “need” for arches than anyone else did; they simply recognized the utility of the arch and applied it wherever they could, as was typical of the Roman civilization’s efficient nature.