Hello, I’ve always been curious about how ancient underground tunnels and structures, such as the Roman aqueducts and Ancient Egyptian tombs, managed to avoid collapse or dangerous cave-ins. I’ve searched online but found limited information.
I’m particularly interested in understanding what materials and techniques were used to reinforce these structures and how it was done. For instance, did they build brick walls or simply cover everything in concrete? Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
In: Engineering
A common adage in engineering is “anyone can build a bridge that stands up, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands up.” The idea is that with a lot of modern construction the goal is to build a thing that’s safe and does its job, but minimizes unnecessary costs.
For a lot of Roman and other ancient construction, they simply didn’t do that. They didn’t have the materials knowledge that we have today, so everything they built wound up being built way, way, way stronger than it needed to be. They didn’t use any particular special techniques, but rather because they didn’t have the techniques we do today they used brute force to have confidence in the stability of what they built that we can get much easier today.
That said, their structures didn’t all last the test of time. We just typically pay the most attention to the ones that did.
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