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Google Earth Recreates Ancient Rome
thefickler writes "Google Earth now includes ancient Rome circa 320 AD, thanks to Google, the University of Virginia, and Past Perfect Productions working together to bring the historical city to life. Clicking on Ancient Rome in 3D, users can revisit Rome from a bygone era and view highly detailed reconstructions of 250 buildings, as well as 5,000 other lesser detailed buildings. 'Pop-up windows provide information on the monuments and visitors also can enter some of the most important sites, including the Senate and the Colosseum, to observe the architecture and marble decorations.'"
There actually is an ancient rome sim in SL:
http://www.rikomatic.com/blog/2007/01/real_world_plac.html
At that time, there was another developed culture of similar size on Earth, although at that time Han China had already split into three kingdoms. There were also other civilized peoples with developed cities in the Middle East, India and Mexico. It would be interesting to see all of them on Google Earth.
I think it has a lot to do with preservation. Remember, the Romans did a lot of their building with stone and Marble. Rome is strewn with buildings from the ancient Roman empire like the Colliseum and the Pantheon. The Chinese, however, used a lot of wood in their cities. Very little of the Han cities survive, making them a bit harder to reconstruct.
I certainly hope this isn't the last, though. I personally would like to see Babylon or one of the Mayan cities like Palenque or Tikal.
The buildings themselves probably weren't (there are some surviving richly-coloured - i.e. non-faded - murals
depicting buildings in the classical "mediterranean" colour scheme), as bright, monochromatic piant was rather
expensive (ground semi-precious stones aren't cheap) - the statues however were, and we can indeed detect very
faint remnants of different pigments on them today. Last I heared it is still debated what pigment stands
for what colour though, but "bright" is consensus amongst scholars by now.
The flip side of using a lot of marble and good stone in building is that a lot of Roman buildings were cannibalized for their stone. The Colesseum has been stripped, for one. (The best example I can think of is Piazza dell'Anfiteatro in Lucca, Italy, where the entire original amphitheater is totally gone, but the fossilzed shape remains in the piazza.)
As a result, most of what we still have is from places that were buried (a la Pompeii), were converted to other uses (the Pantheon is now a church, for example), or places that were abandoned (Ephesus, for instance).
Sounds like Lindsey Davis' Falco: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Didius_Falco
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