Roman civilisation

ROMAN CIVILISATION
PRESENTED BY :-
SAURABH MAURYA,131109030
LALIT KUMAWAT,131109031
RIKHI,131109033
VENODHA,131109036
ALOK TRIPATHI,131109037
SURAJ PATEL,131109039
JAYACHANDRA,131109040
ALOK SINGH,131109042
Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology

STRUCTURE OF THE PRESENTATION
• LOCATION
• IN THE BEGINNING
• FORMATION OF ROMAN REPUBLIC
• THE EMPIRE’S HIGH WATER MARK
• CITY AS INSTRUMENTS OF EMPIRE
• THE ROMAN URBAN SYSTEM AROUND 200 AD
• ROMAN CITIES AND TOWN
• PLAN OF THE ROME AND GRID IRON PLAN
• ROADS
• FORUMS
• CONCLUSION

ROMAN CIVILISATION
• Ancient Rome was an Italic civilization that began on
the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC.
Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered
on the city of Rome.
• It expanded to become one of the largest empires in
the ancient world with an estimated 50 to 90 million
inhabitants (roughly 20% of the world's population)
and covering 6.5 million square kilometers
(2.5 million sq. mi) during its height between the first
and second centuries AD.

LOCATION
WORLD MAP
ROMAN CIVILISATION

• Ancient Rome begin
as a group of villages
along the Tiber River
in what is now Italy.
• Around 750 B.C.
these villages united
to form the city of
Rome.
In the Beginning…

• For more than 200 years, kings ruled Rome.
• In 509 B.C. Rome became a republic.
• The Roman Senate was an assembly of elected
representatives. It was the single most
powerful ruling body of the Roman Republic.
Formation of Roman Republic

The Empire’s high-water mark
Roman empire in 117 AD

Cities as instruments of empire
 Rome expanded beyond Italian peninsula in 133BC
 Romans played their enemies off each other, then
planted colonial cities to administer conquered
lands
 The “castra” or army camp was walled and laid out
in a grid → planned cities (< 5,000 pop.)
 Empire’s maximum extent by 211AD, collapsed
after 250AD

The Roman urban system
around 200 AD

ROMAN CITIES
• The typical Roman city of the later Republic and
empire had a rectangular plan and resembled a
Roman military camp with two main streets—the
cardo (north-south) and the decumanus (east-
west)—a grid of smaller streets dividing the town
into blocks, and a wall circuit with gates.
• Older cities, such as Rome itself, founded before
the adoption of regularized city planning, could,
however, consist of a maze of crooked streets. The
focal point of the city was its forum, usually
situated at the center of the city at the intersection
of the cardo and the decumanus.Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology

ROADS:CARDO AND DECUMANUS

In Ancient Roman towns and cities streets were
narrow and space was limited so houses were
usually small.
They tried to make a limit to how high a building
could be, and how much space there was
between buildings. Roofs had to be flat and go
between buildings to help when fire fighting.
Background Information
Roman Towns

Towns in Rome were made up
of streets and blocks - called
insulae - which contained
houses, shops, workshops
and bars.
Bath houses were another
type of building important
to the life of town
dwellers.
Roman Towns

Most Roman towns were smaller than
modern cities, with populations ranging
between a few thousand people to
perhaps 30,000. Only great trading cities
and capitals of the Empire were bigger
than this. Rome was home to a million
or more.
Roman Towns

At the centre of the town there was usually a
forum, or market place, where people went to
conduct business and gossip. Next to the
forum was the basilica or town hall, dedicated
to the old Roman Gods. Other temples
around the town were dedicated to a variety
of Gods.
Roman Towns

By the time of Augustus,
Rome had grown from a tiny
settlement on the Tiber River
to a metropolis at the center
of an expanding empire.
Under the republic Rome
became the political capital
of the Mediterranean and a
symbol of Roman power and
wealth.
Plan of the City of Rome

Grid (or gridiron) plan
 Easy to lay out
 Easy to administer
 Breezes could flow through for natural
ventilation
 Easy to defend if walled

Pompeii shows that this was an
ideal, not a rule
Source: http://www.pompeii.co.uk/cd/map.htm

Roads

STREET PATTERN
The interior of the town was divided by streets into
a chess-board pattern of small square house-
blocks; from north to south
there were twelve such blocks and from east to
west eleven—not twelve, as is often stated.

All Roads Lead to Rome

An expanding network of
roads helped to link
Rome's distant territories.
One of the most important
paved military roads was
the Appian Way,
commissioned by the
Roman official Appius
Claudius Caecus. It became
the major route from
Rome to Greece.
Appian Way

Typical Roman street, Pompeii
The need to move
legions and trade
goods in all weather
led to the development
of the best roads in the
world (to the 19th
century).Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology

• In the 8th century B.C.,
the inhabitants of some
small Latin settlements
on hills in the TIBER
VALLEY united and
established a common
meeting place, the
FORUM, around which
the city of Rome grew.

• The forum, an open area bordered by
colonnades with shops, functioned as the
chief meeting place of the town. It was also
the site of the city's primary religious and
civic buildings, among them the Senate
house, records office, and basilica.
Forums

The Forum
 Bordered by everything important: temples,
offices, jails, butcher shops
 Public processions and ceremonies took
place there
 For a mainly pedestrian population, the
surrounding colonnade was a very
important urban design feature

Roman Forum (artist’s conception)
Source: A.E.J. Morris, History of Urban Form

The Forum was
their version of
the agora
(this one is in Pompeii,
a city preserved in
volcanic ash of Mt.
Vesuvius from the 1st
century BC)

Main forum in Rome
temples
public records
senate
chambers
law courtsMaulana Azad National Institute of Technology

Public baths,
Pompeii
Romans took public
bathing to an
extreme: hot, cold,
and lukewarm pools,
places to get a
massage or work out,
even reading rooms

The Romans were very practical but they also
carried remnants of an older, mystical view of
the city
 Augury (an animal was cut open in order to
examine its entrails for signs that it was a good
or bad place for a city)
 At founding of a city, a priest would plow the
outline of the city to ritually mark it off from
the surrounding wilderness
 The city was divided into quarters by the
creation of two perpendicular streets: the
Cardo and the Decumanus
CONCLUSION

REFERENCES
• GOOGLE IMAGES
• www.utexas.edu.com
• www.crystalinks.com
• THE URBAN PATTERN: ARTHUR GALLION &
SIMON EISNER

Roman civilisation

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