#Roman Insula

[5-turtleducks-in-a-trenchcoat]

Everytime I listen to the Ancient Rome Sidequest it destroys me emotionally. But who knows, maybe somewhere there's a world where nothing terrible happens and it's just Sasha and Grizzop having fun adventures in ancient Rome.

[historywaitsfornoone]

Did Roman apartment houses have a "Super" on site, or a doorman? Was parking included for your horse and wagon? What happened if your insula went condo? In this video you'll learn about Roman apartment houses, or insulae; who lived in an insula, and on what floors; the floor plan of a typical insula; and what a typical insula would have looked like.

[jg-sims-build]

A city of brick, a city of marble.

I finally built the shell of the Mamertine Prison. I moved and embellished two of the insulae and moved them to the foot of the Capitoline hill.  Also, I built a smaller version of the Porticus Deorum Consentium.

This basically begins the first of the actual street scenes leading into the city center and creates a very big contrast between the Augustan Forum in its splendor and the blighted lives of the Empire’s working classes. My next task is to sculpt and landscape the Capitoline hill then work my way outward to the other geographic features.

Cross-posted from my art blog.

[ancientromebuildings]

Via della Fontana, Ostia Antica

July 2015

[ it was pretty hot, as you can see :) ]

[greekmythcomix]

Between 2018-2021 I worked with archaeologist Dr Sophie Hay, Ancient Historian Prof. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Director of the Cambridge Schools Classics Project (who make the CLC Latin course!) Caroline Bristow and her gorgeous team, and legendary historical children’s fiction author Caroline Lawrence, to illustrate a novel and ancient history course about the life of Pompeiian freedman Amarantus and his neighbours in Insula 1.9

The story is a year in the life of Amarantus, following the events he experiences, including the devastating earthquake of 63BCE and his manumission (by a certain local natural-history-loving magistrate), the traditions of a Roman life, and the likely inhabitants of the rest of his block, based on the buildings and finds in Insula 1.9.

It acts as an Ancient History/Classical Civilisation (non-language) prequel to the Latin Caecilius stories (CLC Book 1) and there are some Caecilius-themed visual easter eggs 😁

The course has been designed for even non-specialists to be able to pick up and teach, entirely for free, to help bring Ancient History/Classics into schools.

We made the images in grayscale so they could be cheaply printed and reproduced in PoD books/PDFs for schools, but made some images in full colour for the website and book cover to show the diversity of the Pompeiian world. They’re all based on archaeological evidence and research and each one took hours of discussion and argument (and occasional paper models) to get right. (And I’m proud to say my rebuilding of some ruined structures like the Herculaneum Gate has been approved by other Pompeii experts, like the Cooleys 😁)

The entire book and course is massively researched and based on archaeological findings, and is FREE on the CSCP website: https://CambridgeAmarantus.com/home

Or you can buy the book PoD via these links: https://www.cambridgescp.com/array/buy-book

Bonus Roman Chickens (the precursors to my Roman History Chickens series!): the cockfighters Odysseus and Polyphemus! (And yes cockfighting is terrible and I’m glad we don’t have it any more)

[transgenderer]

The insulae could be built up to nine storeys, before  Augustus  introduced a height limit of about 70 Roman feet (20.7 m). Later, this was reduced further, to about 60 Roman feet (17.75 m).[10][11] The notably large Insula Felicles or Felicula was located near the Circus Flaminius in Regio IX; the early Christian writer  Tertullian condemns the hubris of multiple-story buildings by comparing the Felicles to the towering homes of the gods.[12] It is posited that a typical insula would accommodate over 40 people in only 3,600 sq ft (330 m2); however, an entire structure could comprise about six to seven apartments, each covering about 1,000 sq ft (93 m2) in floor area.[citation needed] The only surviving insula in Rome is the five storey Insula dell'Ara Coeli  dating from the 2nd century AD, which is found at the foot of the Capitoline Hill.[13][14]

[script-a-world]

Submitted via Google Form:

Since a lot of the desert is not very habitable, my world has a lot of underground buildings in the desert very high tech so that the natural land isn't very important. What do I need to consider for this?

Tex: Do you have a particular desert in mind with this question? There’s a fair amount of deserts that are inhabited already by flora and fauna, if not to a hundred percent coverage, such as the Great Basin desert, Kalahari Desert, and the deserts of Australia.

Deserts that have less flora and fauna, and are of the more popular imagination, such as the Sahara, Gobi Desert, and Syrian Desert, will have pockets of inhabitation around places like wadis, where there’s enough underground pooled water for migrational animals - including humans - to travel to and from. It’s not unusual to see water, and thus inhabitation, around mountainous regions in the desert, or by the borders of a desert where climate zones shift based upon geological features.

Humans have been living in and around the desert for a very, very long time (Wikipedia). Because of this, they’ve developed methods of surviving, and while it might not necessarily be an analogue to denser human populations like New York City that’s teeming with life and a focus of travel, a life is made.

Aridity isn’t necessarily the domain of traditional deserts, either - mountains are a good example of this, as are certain popular examples of civilizations in these areas. Petra is a popular example, home to the Nabataeans and geographically within modern-day Jordan. A notable mountain peak, Tian Shan, in Central Asia, was one of many places the Yuezhi people lived, who were nomadic and lived not only in the surrounding area but also across places like the Tarim Basin and the Tibetan Plateau. There’s a lot of examples of similar situations in other parts of the globe, so this is not an isolated event in human history.

Now, what is your definition of high tech? Skyscrapers? Internet? Something else? Lighting is something humans have had for a while, in the form of candles, hearths, and lamps, and we’ve more or less had an electrical grid in some places since the late 1880s (Wikipedia).

Plumbing has existed for thousands of years in some form for both fresh and wastewater (Wikipedia 1, Wikipedia 2), as has architectural features such as bridges (Wikipedia) and other types of architectural works (Wikipedia). Multi-story buildings have also existed for a while, notable in Roman insulae and Egyptian city of Fustat.

Telecommunications has existed in some form for about as long as human civilization has existed (Wikipedia), but electronic telecommunications began at about 1830-1840 (Wikipedia). I don’t know if you consider this sufficiently old or sufficiently modern, but the information is there for your perusal. Accordingly, the predecessor to the modern internet, ARPANET, was a multi-country project that began in the 1960s and established by the US Department of Defense - and computing hardware has a before and after historical split in technological advances at about the same time (Wikipedia).

What are your goals with this setting and this technology? What are the reasons that your society is living in such an area with such a climate, and what are they using the technology for? Are the communicating with people outside of this area? Is the technology completely isolated, for archival purposes, or is it interacted with on a regular or frequent basis? How much of this is aesthetic, and how much of it is part of a plot or culture?

Utuabzu: Historically, there have been several cultures in arid environments that favoured partly or wholly underground structures, from the Ancestoral Puebloans of the American South West, who sometimes built into the sides of canyons to the Derinkuyu Underground City in south-eastern Türkiye, to the modern town of Cooper Pedy in South Australia. These sites vary significantly in form and in motivation, with the Ancestoral Puebloan canyonside structures built primarily for defense, Derinkuyu built partly for defense and partly just because the local stone was really easy to carve through and vast underground spaces made for convenient storage, and Cooper Pedy is underground to mitigate the worst of the desert heat, mostly utilising exhausted opal mines.

Any or all of these reasons could apply, and would impact your setting’s architecture and urban forms, but the biggest impact is always going to come from the reason people started living there in the first place. The Ancestoral Puebloans farmed the fertile river valleys, Derinkuyu lies in Cappadokia, a region that once gave rise to the Hittite Empire and has plenty of decent farmland and pasture, while Cooper Pedy is a major centre for opal mining. 

I’d suggest considering why this culture lives in the desert in the first place, and then researching what similar locations in the real world look like. Also, decide what sort of desert you’re working with. As Tex said, there’s a lot of different kinds of desert, and they have historically produced very different cultures and architectural traditions. What makes sense in the hot sandy deserts of the Arabian Peninsula or Northern Africa does not necessarily make sense in even the relatively nearby Iranian Plateau or Thar Desert, let alone the cold deserts of Central Asia or the high altitude Atacama or Tibetan Plateau.

[whencyclopedia]

As elsewhere, whether on a farm or in the city, daily life still centered on the home, and when people arrived in the city, their first concern was to find a place to live. Space was at a premium in a walled metropolis like Rome, and from the beginning little attention was paid to the housing needs of the people who migrated to the city - tenements provided the best answer. The majority of Roman citizens, not all of them poor, lived in these apartment buildings or insulae. As early as 150 BCE, there were over 46,000 insulae throughout the city. LEARN MORE --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47RPlvgi2VQ

[blueiscoool]

Archaeologists Uncover Two New Pompeii Victims Killed by Earthquake

Archaeologists working at Pompeii have found two new victims that they say were killed by an earthquake that accompanied the volcanic eruption of 79 AD.

The Italian city may be most closely associated with the destruction wrought by the eruption of Vesuvius, but these two men were in fact killed by walls knocked down by a simultaneous earthquake, according to the official Pompeii archaeological site.

“Part of the south wall of the room collapsed, crushing one of the men whose raised arm offers a tragic image of his vain attempt to protect himself from the falling masonry,” reads a press release on Tuesday.

“The conditions of the west wall demonstrate the tremendous force of the earthquakes that took place at the same time as the eruption: the entire upper section was detached and fell into the room, crushing and burying the other individual,” it continues.

The pair, who were at least 55 years old, were found during excavations of the Insula of the House of the Chaste Lovers during work to improve the safety of the building.

They were found lying in a utility room where they had sought refuge, and were killed by multiple traumas as parts of the building collapse.

Archaeologists found organic matter, which they believe to be a bundle of fabric, as well as glass paste, which is thought to be the beads of a necklace and six coins. The team also found an amphora leaning against a wall and a number of vessels, bowls and jugs.

In an adjoining room, archaeologists found a stone kitchen counter covered in powdered lime, which they say suggests that building work was being undertaken nearby at the time of the eruption.

The discovery “shows how much there is still to discover about the terrible eruption of AD 79 and confirms the necessity of continuing scientific investigation and excavations,” said Italy’s Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano in the release.

“Pompeii is an immense archaeological laboratory that has regained vigour in recent years, astonishing the world with the continuous discoveries brought to light and demonstrating Italian excellence in this sector,” he added.

Details of the excavation were published in the E-Journal of Pompeii.

The Roman city of Pompeii was buried under meters of pumice and ash in the calamitous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

Archaeologists have uncovered only around two thirds of the 66-hectare (163 acres) site since excavations began 250 years ago.

By Jack Guy.

[vecchiorovere]

Insieme agli scavi di San Clemente, le Case romane del Celio rappresentano uno dei luoghi più affascinanti della Roma sotterranea per la presenza di decorazioni originali e per le vicende che nei secoli hanno inciso profondi cambiamenti alla struttura

La straordinarietà dello stato di conservazione degli ambienti affrescati e l’altissimo valore artistico e di interesse religioso fanno delle Case romane del Celio una tappa fondamentale nella conoscenza della Roma antica.

Note anche come la "casa dei martiri Giovanni e Paolo", racchiudono oltre quattro secoli di storia e testimoniano il passaggio e la convivenza tra paganesimo e cristianesimo.

I vasti ambienti interni, in origine botteghe e magazzini di un edifico popolare a più piani (insula), furono infatti trasformati nel corso del III sec. d.C. in un’elegante domus. Qui è possibile ammirare alcuni tra gli affreschi più belli di età tardo-antica.

[jg-abuyuan-art]

A City of Brick, a City of Marble (2023)

A few screenshots of a personal project I made in the Sims 3. Called Latium, it an artistic and significantly scaled down reproduction of Ancient Rome during the First Century CE. Featured are various artistic depictions of real-world structures that have been constructed in the Roman Forum and the foot of the Capitoline Hill as they might’ve appeared toward the end of Emperor Augustus’ rule.

Other buildings are reconstructions of commoner structures that would’ve filled in the space between the monuments of the real city. I drew inspiration from various reconstructions of the era (both historical and artistic), most notably Digitalis Forum Romanum and the sets of HBO’s Rome and the BBC’s Ancient Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire.

Progress report:

I finally built the shell of the Mamertine Prison. I moved and embellished two of the insulae and moved them to the foot of the Capitoline hill.  Also, I built a smaller version of the Porticus Deorum Consentium.

This basically begins the first of the actual street scenes leading into the city center and creates a very big contrast between the Augustan Forum in its splendor and the blighted lives of the Empire’s working classes. My next task is to sculpt and landscape the Capitoline hill then work my way outward to the other geographic features.

You can view the rest of this project on my dedicated Sims 3 build blog.

–

Program: The Sims 3, The Sims 3 Create-A-World

Date:  27 January 2023

Usage: In progress

[moriche]

Hello dear friend Moriche,

Might I please have 21 (First major change in their life, and how they dealt with it) and 25 (First major success in their story) for Veryn.

And could I also have 🌍 (First attempt at worldbuilding, or a notable piece of worldbuilding you're proud of) and ‼️ (Free space! Tell us about a notable "first" in your writing journey!) from you?

Hello! Thank you so much for your asks! You may absolutely have the answers :D 21 - First major change in their life, and how they dealt with it

Veryn's first truly major change in life was when he was given the opportunity to go to the Arcane University. He'd been apprenticing at the Mages Guild since he was 13 years old, and being gifted enough at magic, the Guild gave him a scholarship to attend the University. He took it very well - he moved out from the orphanage of St. Alessia into a small room in one of the many insulae of the Arena District. He flourished at university, meeting new friends, gaining a lover, and everything went incredibly well if not for that one night that instigated the second major change... 25 - First major success in their story To some extent, that'd be the University too, but that's the boring answer. The first major success he's gotten in Fear in a Handful of Dust is breaking into Sharn's house on Caius orders, in order to find out that she is a necromancer. He's scared as hell, but he plans the break-in well and manages to pull it off without a hitch.

A large chest stood at the foot of her bed, the kind you’d store blankets in. Veryn reached out towards it, and then yanked his hand back when his sense of magic screeched in alarm. “Damnit!” When he looked closer, he realised that the chest was trapped, and that the ensuing spell would have crumbled his hand to dust. He’d bet his savings there wasn’t anything remotely near bed linen inside. Another tiny cut; some blood-filled runes. The ritual took hold, and Veryn blinked rapidly to get rid of the dizziness that washed over him. Overriding two wards at once took an awful lot of energy, and he wouldn’t have long before his magicka ran dangerously low. He downed a potion to stave off the worst of it, but getting caught inside while the wards became active again wasn’t something he looked forward to. Hidden inside the chest were more books, together with neatly stacked bundles of notes. Veryn took out the one on top, a heavy tome called Legions of the Dead. At first sight it seemed to be an overview of different kinds of undead, but when he read some sections it didn’t stop at that. The text dealt with summoning too, and with preparing the ancient dead in order to resurrect them. The next two books were a treatise on soul magic, and a manual on how to safely handle black soul gems. “You’re not a Blade,” he whispered to himself, putting the book back where it belonged and reaching for a sheaf of notes. “You’re a necromancer. The Temple would kill you if they ever found out.”

🌍 - First attempt at worldbuilding, or a notable piece of worldbuilding you're proud of

I'm going to go with this little tidbit I added early into Fear in a Handful of Dust. Way back, my degree was in Medieval History, and that is still something I very heavily draw on while worldbuilding. Inspired by this old concept artwork of a procession of Vivec, I gave Morrowind Miracle Plays. In real life, they're medieval plays that show important/well known/popular stories from the Bible. Given how much the Temple feels based on medieval Roman-Catholicism, I knew I had to add those plays to Morrowind as well.

It helped with figuring out the Temple religion, too. Each Saint’s Day — and there were a surprising amount of them — the local craftsmer guilds hosted miracle plays. They acted out segments from the scriptures of the Three, and from countless hagiographies. Not only was it neat to watch, but it also showed which parts of their religion the local Dunmer considered most important: second only to the living gods were Saint Veloth and Saint Nerevar.

‼️ - Free space! Tell us about a notable "first" in your writing journey!

I've had so many firsts but I'm going to talk about the first time joining a writing community! In this case, the /r/fanfiction discord server, a place where I was warmly welcomed and where I made a lot of good friends. I've joined more discords and communities since then, but I'm still very active on that first one too. Eventually that all led to me re-activating my Tumblr and reaching out and making friends within the TES community here too :D! Writing with friends is much more fun than writing alone - having folks cheer you on and interact with you is so amazing <3. So thank you for giving me those asks and liking and reblogging, all of you! You're wonderful!

[collapsedsquid]

In summary, then, the remains of the apartment buildings at Ostia reflect a tiered system of urban leasehold that is detectable also at Rome in legal and literary sources. Those at a certain distance above the lower classes rented, for long terms, relatively large and high-quality apartments, in which they might sublease rooms in order to help pay their own rent; while the poor made do with short-term leases in tenements that physically resembled inns. This is the model that I promised above, and it is subject to the limitations I mentioned. This model is interesting for its evidence of how thoroughly a basic economic structure like the urban rental market was, in the Roman world, not ' economic ' in the modern sense of maximised profit, but instead interpenetrated by considerations of social status and subjected to social restraint and regulation. To such an extent was this true that the Roman market remained economically wasteful in many respects, particularly in its tendency to multiply risks; for example, the widespread use of entrepreneurial middlemen (above, n. 8) drove up the rents of everyone. The rich paid more because of delayed-payment leases, which had the disadvantage of being risky for the landlord; so too did the poor, above all because of the shortness of their term of lease. In neither case was the form of lease determined solely by the market's operation; delayed-payment leases, in particular, may have been an inherited feature, formed perhaps on the analogy of farming leases where delayed payment was economically rational. The survival of the delayed payment, one might hypothesize, was precisely due to the element of social trust it seemed to imply. No impetus to the improvement of the rental market's efficiency appears to have existed. Even the simplest devices to eliminate local inequities in the market, such as public or private clearing-houses for rental information,are never attested. The owners of insulae were apparently for the most part wealthy members of the upper classes, casually investing in the hope of a guaranteed return; freedmen, by contrast, do not seem to have bought up urban housing, though Trimalchio did own an insula (Petron., Cen. Trim. 7I. 2). What is even more significant is the absence of class-consciousness among tenants; for example, no source ever complains, in the fashion of the modern age, about the landlords of Rome as a class. Contrast the result when in 68 Nero, despite economic circumstances already very trying for the urban population, attempted to divert tenants' annual rental payments from their landlords to the fiscus (Suet., Nero 44. 2); the measure brought on open resistance from tenants, who probably feared (quite rightly, as Suetonius points out) that the agents of the fiscus would be far less tolerant of payment compromises than were their own landlords. The perennial outcry of ancient authors about high rents in Rome does have an ironic aspect, therefore, although admittedly high rents were largely the result of over-intensive use of land.

[docendo]

Church of Saint Bartholomew Tiber Island by George Gallagher Via Flickr: The Basilica of St. Bartholomew on the Island (Italian: Basilica di San Bartolomeo all'Isola , Latin: Basilica S. Bartholomaei in Insula) is a titular minor basilica, located in Rome, Italy. It was founded at the end of the 10th century by Otto III, Holy Roman Emperor. It contains the relics of St. Bartholomew the Apostle, and is located on Tiber Island, on the site of the former temple of Aesculapius, which had cleansed the island of its former ill-repute among the Romans and established its reputation as a hospital, continued under Christian auspices today.

[mariamilani]

Ancient Roman Homes and Houses

Ancient Roman Homes and Houses: What was the layout of a Roman house? What was an ‘insulae’ apartment block like? As with other aspects of ancient Roman life, Roman homes, houses and Roman villas underwent a degree of evolution, particularly as the fortunes of Rome impacted wealth, society, roman technology and standards of living.

[kaiyves-backup]

New information relating to Roman construction techniques is emerging from the ongoing excavations at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. In the rooms of the ancient domus in Region IX, insula 10 excavations are revealing important evidence of a building site in full swing: work tools, stacked tiles, bricks of tuff, and piles of lime.

According to scholars, the building site was active up until the day of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, which began around lunchtime and lasted until the morning of the following day. The excavation of this area, aimed at regulating the hydrogeological situation along the boundary between the excavated and unexcavated parts of the Roman city, is revealing the presence of an ancient building site that affected the entire insula block. In particular, abundant evidence of building work in progress can be found in the house with the bakery of Rustius Verus, where a still life depicting a focaccia and a goblet of wine has already been documented in recent months.