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Planning in ancient times.

by Egenia Salza Prina Ricotti

PLANNING BUILDINGS IN THE ANCIENT TIMES
Exactly as we do it now, also in the ancient time, in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in Greece or in Rome, to be entrusted of a work an architect had to be the first in a contest, or, even better, to win the favour of a wealthy client. When he succeeded in one of this way, he had to present his plan and to discuss it with the committer. Usually the documentation included maps, elevations, details, and perspectives. As Vitruvius tells us, also then the project of a building temple or whatever else could it be must be endowed of very technical drawings and coloured perspectives. Then as all the plans and drawings could never give a clear idea of an edifice to some one who was not an architect, and as the committers could easily be fooled by a certain number of perspectives cunningly strained that made the smallest building looks as an imposing edifice, the architect was obliged to complete his presentation with a scale model that would allow the committer to see exactly what he would get.
All this documentation was not thrown away after the completion of the building, and the plans of the more important buildings were preserved in the times’s archives. In Egypt they were saved in the temples, and here some documents of the II millenium B.C. were still found. As for Greece, when in 548 B.C. the temple of the Apollo of Delphi took fire it was for the original plans of the Corinthian architect Spintaros, saved, as Pausanias tells us, “In the holy Treasures” that it was possible to reconstruct the temple just as it was. The only thing that was changed was the material used for its structure. Once had been built in simple stone but now it was erected in marble.
Of course not much of those plans came to us. What the have are just fragments. Obviously the more ancient of them are the Egyptian ones and among them a papyrus with a 1166 B.C. plan of Ramses the IV’s tomb and also a big 1100 ceramic tile with the plan of Ramses IX’s last resting place. They are very interesting documents that follow the not too easy to understand Egyptian technical system of drawing. In their projects the stylized door are not drawn in plan, but in elevation and they are placed laterally or perpendicular to the walls in which they would be opened. Thus they are very decorative drawings but absolutely not in scale and, as such, they are only indicative sketches, in which the different rooms don’t have their real proportions and small cubicles are represented much larger than the really ample ones. To sum it up, for the Egyptians architectural drawings had the sole function to show the galleries connecting the tomb’s recesses, and the doors that opened in them. On the contrary very functional were the script marked in each room, and in every one of them its real dimension was fixed in cubit and palms. To control that was easy. It was enough to read the measures set by the ancient architect on the plan and confront them with the different parts of the monument. The control showed that they were exact.


Fig. 1 -Translation of the hyeorgraph on the plan for the tomb of Ramses VI

Y The sarcophagous room
Ya Its door is close.
Yb The gold’s room where he rest 14.70 m long and 14,70 wide and 9.360 high, ornated, chiseled, colored, trimmed and furnished with all His Majesty the King’s equipment (He is alive, he is blessed and healthy) and they are put at his two side together with the ennead divinity who is in the afterlife.
Yc Together beginning by the passageway that bring to the House of Gold.
Yd Together beginning by the gold’s room till the most inner room, 149 m.
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Z Treasure room
Za Its door is close
Zb The passageway for the Shabti is 14 cubits and three palms. It is 4.50 m wide, 6.60 high ornated, chiseled, colored, trimmed. The southern one is the same.
Zc The gods’s shrine is 4.70 m long,1.95 high and 1.60 deep.
Zd The side treasury is 9.90 m and 3.30 wide.
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W Passageway
Wa Its door is close.
Wb The fourth passageway is 22.75 m long, 5.45 wide and 8.95 high, ornated, chiseled, colored, and trimmed
Wc The ramp is 18.24 m long and 4.78 wide.
Wd This room is 1.85 m longm 1.30 wide and 1.30 deep.
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X Antechamber
Xa Its door is close.
Xb The Antechamber is 8,20 m long, 7.30 wide and 7.30 high ornated, chiseled, colored, trimmed.
Xc End of the Sarcophagous’s ramp 2.75 m.
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We were even able to fix the unity of measure used in each project, but only keeping in mind that at those times there were not standard measurements, and that they were particular for the different periods and even the places. Then, as in Egypt there were all the cubits of different length the control had to be repeated every time and in every case. However once that we succeeded to individuate the cubit used in the place, the control proved that the builder strictly followed the measurements fixed by the architect and written in the plan. To sum it up, ancient Egyptian architectural drawings were maybe quite primordial, but they also were executive projects and perfectly realizable.
Many centuries had to go by before that from this empirical system of planning the world arrived to drawings made in scale. The most important plan we know is the colossal “Forma Urbis” of Severian time dated around the 203-209 A.D., a slab of marble measuring 13 x 18.10 m that, with a sure decorative effect, was fixed on one of the “Forum Pacis” wall. On it a very exact planimetry of all the town of Rome had been engraved. We see that it was probably based on the time’s land register and drawn on the marble slab in a scale of 1/240. Unfortunately it has been destroyed and today we have only some fragments of it that cover only a tenth of its surface. However in this small number of pieces left to us we can see temples and famous monuments as they were 2000 years ago, still perfectly inserted in the tissue of the ancient town. Near them we still find the private house’s plans with all their smallest details: rooms, atria, peristyles and so on.
Of course in ancient Rome there also were more modest plans that have arrived to us engraved on marble slabs and they can be very interesting as the one we find on a sepulchral stele, where aside the tomb plan - with even a triclinium to use for the ceremonial dinners in honour of the dead -, there is the guardian’s two floor house with all its details.
Particular is then a mosaic that emerged in Via Marsala, just near Rome’s Termini Station, from some excavations of the XIX cent.. It consisted of three fragments of a floor on which the plan of a thermal structure had been reproduced; a building that would have had a 24 m side and that presented different rooms endowed by ample basins. Not, then, a private house’s therm, because those are normally composed by only a small “tepidarium”, a small “calidarium” and, in the more pretentious case, by a cold water basin. This plan represents a larger one and it probably show all the thermal rooms of a a middle size public structure managed by a private citizen, like many others that existed in Rome. In Augustan times we know of at least 170 private citizen’s owned public baths.
The most striking thing in this mosaic plan – a very decorative element - that probably occupied the centre of the entrance or the floor of a “frigidarium”, is that it was a real architectural plan done in perfect scale, and, precisely, in a 1/16 scale. Then, to make it more exact, the width and length of each rooms had been marked in Roman feet measuring cm 29,6 on each one of them. A perfect polychromatic drawing, then, with technical details as the water conducts, but also a mosaic that put various questions. Why, for instance, instead of the more common Neptune’s head or of a certain number of beautiful Nereids such original decoration was used in the entrance hall of a therma? The only possible answer is that this special mosaic was ordered by the committer, the man who financed the building, because on it he could put his name and accompany it by many praises.


Bibliography
Scientific popularization
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Gli architetti e progettazione di architettura nell'antichità in Archeo (Anno XI, nº 12 (142) December 1996, pp. 58 - 85.

Accademic books and papers
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI - Villa Adriana. Un singolare solaio piano in opus caementicium, in Palladio, Nuova serie, Anno I, N. 1, Giugno 1988. pp. 1-12.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Adriano: architettura del verde e dell’acqua in Horti Romani, Rome , 1995, pp. 363-399.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI – Hadrien, architecte, ingénieur et urbaniste, in Hadrien. Trésors d’une villa impériale, Italia 1999, pp. 37-46
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI – Adriano, architetto, ingegnere e urbanista, in Adriano architettura e progetto, Italia 2000, pp. 41-45 e schede