eli5 why ancient historical buildings haven’t been kept up? Why are buildings like the Parthenon and the Colosseum in such disrepair? Greece and Rome/Italy have existed the entire time?
In: 508
Resources. These constructions represent somewhat of a pinnacle of entire empires. So there is this vast foundation that is needed for any society to build stuff like this.
If a society expends 95% of their effort merely to give basic food and shelter to their populace, they won’t have resources left over to build or maintain such structures. Apart from a few notable empires (and in historic times, it TOOK the resources of an empire), most of the time humanity could basically only get by.
So underlying these things are conquests, slavery, and much looting etc. Once an empire collapses, it basically cannot afford the resources.
This was mostly true until the Industrial Revolution when humanity started to use a lot of non-muscle based energy on demand (not like wind energy for sails, windmills etc). Think of it this way, until the mid 1800s the vast majority of humanity had to engage in agriculture and livestock rearing just to feed itself. Today, modern economies have less than 10% of their human population engaged in agriculture. This frees up a lot more resources to build and do stuff.
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