Walking into a new world
This is the first time I share a more personal story on this site. As I set out to create a place where people could come and interact with ancient history in a way that provided a new narrative in a bit sized and digestible way. Over the course of writing my first couple of articles, I learned a lot about how I wanted it to sound and the type of research I wanted to do. I found that a first person narrative on ancient accounts read in a more engaged way then your typical history paper does. Sadly, I learned this after I had done a couple of articles that I will have to go back and rewrite!
It will always be a work in progress, yet if even one new person became interested and inspired to learn more about our shared past, to me, It would be worth it. I didn’t want this to be some personal travel diary, it is a labor of love for something that is truly so important. We learn so much about who we as humans are today by looking at where we came from, and the grand puzzle being pieced together.
With that, I did want to share a more personal touch with history and some of the things that fascinate me deeply. Having recently visited the awesome site of Pompeii, there is something that I couldn’t stop chuckling to myself about. The crosswalks. Yes, even in Ancient Rome pedestrians needed a place to get over the road, in their case it was to avoid walking through some… things best left to wash out in the rain.
Ancient to New
One of the most interesting things about it was, I could see the size of the rocket boosters of the space shuttle in these streets that were buried thousands of years ago. If that last statement made you scratch your head, I can understand. The Romans mass produced chariots and carts to be 4 feet 8.5 inches wide, about 1.5 meters. This lead to the old roman roads being rutted out, leaving these tracks where all of the chariots and carts would be pulled through. This held through most of time while the horse was still the main mode of transport in Europe. Fast forward to the tramway, the first rounds of these were pulled by horses in the ruts of the old roman roads, and a width of 4 feet 8.5 inches. These trams were the foundation for the train, and a standard gauge of a train is, you guessed it, 4 feet 8.5 inches. So when the space shuttle was being designed the rockets had to be made in Utah in the United States and had to me shipped, by train, to Florida on the east side of the United States. This would mean that the engineers building the rockets had to produce a product in a size that was dictated to them thousands of years ago.
Back to the crosswalks
So that probably makes you wonder, why is he on about space ships when talking about crosswalks in Pompeii. Well, because the Romans mass produced the wagons and chariots the way they did, the Romans and those in the empire could produce stones that stuck up out of the road perfectly so that a wagon could go over them. People would use these stones to stay out of the streets but cross over as needed. I’m sure there was no jaywalking, at least that is what I could get from the grafitti in Pompeii! Sadly, most of these would have been plucked out of most cities as the middle ages looked to use these old roman stones to build their own new projects. These stones were not perfectly cut, they just needed to be good enough to get by for the Romans.
These stones would jut up from most major intersections and certainly around places that people would need to cross to. Think of things that would make you run across the street, food, water, perhaps a cute person. Sadly It doesn’t appear as if they had them in place if you needed to cross to the last, however most fountains had crosswalks very close to them. These small little moments are what shows us that the more we change as humans the more things stay the same. We still see similar concept and still see the genius of people. The past is fully connected to our shared future and actions taken every day by ordinary people have long lasting impacts on our shared humanity. If I learned one thing from the crosswalks it is this. The names of the people may be lost, but their existence, across the world effects me everyday in ways that I may not know, but am eternally grateful for!
