ShmoopTube

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In the ancient world, people started to build bigger, better, and stronger homes. [Wolf blows at a house]

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Why?

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Because populations became big enough and centralized enough to require them. [City appears in the desert]

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Stronger homes also helped keep away those pesky door-to-door salesmen. [Man with a briefcase knocks on the door]

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Enter: new materials and designs. [Salesman falls down a trap door]

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Ancient civilizations, like Egypt, Rome, Greece, Persia, China, and the Mayan cultures, to name a few, built [Pictures of constructions]

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some of the grandest and most impressive structures in the world.

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And they didn't have a single crane, bulldozer, or dump truck between them.

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Nothin' like good ol' fashioned slave labor to get the job done…well, not all of it [Man dressed in rags pulling a large rock]

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was slave labor…

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Still, any amount of slave labor is too much slave labor.

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But back to building materials…

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First and maybe foremost, ancient peoples kept on building with mud…. [Man chucks mud at another man]

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…but with time, they got way better at it, transforming mud into hard, dry bricks. [Man putting wood into a fire]

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In places like ancient Egypt, bricks were formed out of clay and mud and baked in the

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sun.

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It also gave ancient Egyptians a great chance to work on their tans and pores. [Man sits on hot mud bricks and gets burned]

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Egyptians also came up with mortar, which is a mixture of sand and clay that helped [Bricklayer building a wall]

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hold their bricks together.

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This same process was used to build mud and brick skyscrapers.

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Talk about luxury.

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Wonder if there were doormen.

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The Romans were the first to figure out how to bake their bricks in kilns to make them [Man putting bricks into a kiln]

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stronger. [Brick with arms lifting weights]

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The structures they built could therefore be taller and last longer in the weather. [Picture of a castle]

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The Romans were basically architectural wizards, and they didn’t even have Hogwarts.

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Need more proof of their architectural magic?

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Well, how about this: Romans came up with concrete. [Man dressed as a wizard makes a bag of concrete appear with a wand]

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Yup.

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We know, concrete doesn't seem like an ancient thing…

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…but lo and behold, Roman engineers figured out how to blend lime, sand, and natural cement

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together to make actual-factual concrete. [Man mixing ingredients in a barrel]

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And sure, it took them a while to stop using the citrus fruit, but they figured it out

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eventually.

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Concrete allowed them to build aqueducts, roads, and buildings. [Pictures of Roman contructions]

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And all those cool things would have been super useful in the Middle Ages, except apparently,

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some raging barbarians lost the recipe. [Barbarian rips up the recipe for concrete]

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Nice work there, raging barbarians.

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This is why the Middle Ages couldn't have nice things.

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Anyway.

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Concrete also helped with the construction of large domes in buildings. [Man dressed as a wizard makes a large dome appear on the top of a building]

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Y'know, those bulbous creations, which magically manage to not collapse in a few millennia?

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Yup.

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Concrete.

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Before the Romans, nobody had figured out how to make a domed ceiling. [Man looking at the ceiling scratching his head]

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It's a bit of an engineering and mathematical puzzle.

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But the Romans built one that remained the largest dome in the world for more than 1,000

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years

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Romans also brought us plaster.

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…Okay, they didn't strictly invent plaster, because other people had the idea of putting [Roman man plastering a wall]

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lime and clay on their walls.

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But the Romans definitely used it to a new extent, which made their homes a lot…homier. [Man sipping a drink sat in a luxury room]

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Sorry, next time we’ll try harder with our adjectives. [Thesaurus is chucked at the Shmoop house]

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