Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Would that be Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian??
Rome wasn't sacked in a day.
Can I send in Visigoths from Second Life?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
What would happen if this tool fell into the use of the wrong hands? What if Barbarians were to get a hold of this information?
I want to visit the real Rome with overlay goggles tuned to Google Earth's reconstructions, with GPS. So when I look at the ruins, there's overlay of the original sites. With animations of recreated everyday scenes, and famous scenes (like Senate arguments and speeches, revolts, Coliseum battles, etc) running for my amusement.
In fact, I'd love to see these overlays in goggles in any museum showing artifacts. They're always in crappy shape in their cases (the intact articles are probably all in private collections, the broken ones sold off to finance them). Goggles showing them in their original condition, and in their original usage, would turn those displays from mere trophy cases of booty into actual demonstrations of history and our global heritage.
--
make install -not war
Never mind. All the roads lead to Rome anyway.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
This was sort of done before. There was a myst-style game set in Ancient Rome. It came out circa 1996. You walked aroud acient rome in a myst type environment solving mysteries and puzzles. It was supposed to be geographically realistic. I think there was actually a web-based rpg type version in the 90's too.
I know from multiple sources that all the buildings were actually painted in bright colours (before the fell into disrepair, obviously), and archaeologists know what the colours were, from the remnants of pigments. I was hoping this reconstruction would be more than just white and beige marble veneer...
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. - Jean-Paul Sartre
Visit a modern city here (Windows only).
Yes, this a a nit, but one that I am seeing more and more often.
The entry refers to Rome in "320 AD". This is simply wrong. It is AD 320. Any of you who posted Latin comments are aware of this modern mangling. 320 Anno Domini simply does not make sense. (See Wikipedia article on "Anno Domini".)
As with all issues involving time, it's pretty bogus, anyway, so perhaps /. should just use CE (Common Era).
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
There actually is an ancient rome sim in SL:
http://www.rikomatic.com/blog/2007/01/real_world_plac.html
Anyone even remotely interested in this should be aware of the novels of David Wishart. He is a Classics scholar who writes pop fiction detective novels set in ancient Rome @30 CE.
He has too modern references and word clichés for my taste, but the three novels that I've read of his have been detailed, engrossing, and amusing.
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.
Rome wasn't rendered in a day.
Ubiquitously - A Ubiquity Developer Community
and then convert Google Earth into an online RTS game that lets you pit these ancient armies against one another!
as a side note, i wonder if it'd be possible to create an MMO RTS game given the huge server farms Google has at their disposal.
How long before Google Earth simply features a slider, whereby you can not only view any part of the Earth's surface, but view it at any point in history? Drag the slider back a few centuries and watch the development (and destruction) of major population centres. Accompanied, no doubt, by a sidebar of discreet text ads offering to whisk you back via time machine to the era you appear to be interested in. Just be careful not to step on the butterfly.
It would, but I think one good reason to prioritise Rome is because the layout of the city changed in infuriatingly complicated ways during the centuries it was at its peak. The enormous building works instituted under some emperors (e.g. Augustus and Nero) make it very tiresome trying to work out what was where. It's basically impossible to represent that on a paper map: you need layers of maps. Such things are available, but an electronic version would be very nice.
If it weren't for that complexity, I reckon a single paper map would be just fine. In the case of classical Athens, say, a single paper map is basically fine, as the city's layout was fairly constant during its heyday. (Sure, they built a new acropolis, but it just occupied the site of the old one, mostly.) Conversely, studying archaeological sites whose history spans centuries or millennia -- say, Troy -- would be much easier with a diachronic map of the kind I envisage.
Unfortunately, what they've done isn't actually a diachronic map: it's focussed just on one period (320 CE). So, while glad of this for what it is, I for one am left annoyed at what might have been ...
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).
It's not just construction materials. The population of Rome (the city) at its height was ~1 million (around 0 CE IIRC). After Rome, no other city equaled that until London in 1800!
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
And I thought the imagery in my area was out-of-date. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.