The building layer
Ancient monuments
Named buildings of the ancient world — who paid for them, who built them, what they measure, what they meant, and how much of each one is actually still there.
35 monuments · 100 sourced measurements · 57 unresolved questions
This layer covers individual buildings. It is deliberately separate from the three layers around it, because they answer different questions:
- Athens is a city — where it stood, how it was laid out, who lived in it.
- The Acropolis is an excavated site — who dug it, what came out of the ground, what the excavators got wrong.
- The Parthenon is a monument — one building, its patron, its measurements, its politics and its condition.
- The Greek temple is a building type — the form itself, across every example of it.
Four entities, four search intents. The validator refuses to let them share a slug, a title or a section heading.
Every number says where it comes from
A monument page attracts figures, and most of the figures in circulation are modern estimates repeated as measurements. The Pantheon’s dome is 43.3 metres across because it has been surveyed. The Colosseum held about fifty thousand people because somebody divided the seating by an assumed space per person. The Great Pyramid was 280 cubits high because an Egyptian unit has been converted on an assumption about its length.
Those are three different kinds of statement, and there is no field in this registry where a bare number can be stored. The same applies to names: an attribution is marked documented only where an inscription, a building account, a brick stamp or a named ancient source with a chapter supports it. Iktinos is named for the Parthenon by Plutarch four centuries later. Philokles is named for the Erechtheion in a contemporary Athenian inspection inscription. Imhotep is named on a statue base of his own king. Those are three different claims and the pages do not treat them as one.
What is actually still there
The most useful thing a monument page can tell a reader first is how much of it exists. The Pantheon is roofed and entire; the Temple of Castor and Pollux is three columns; the Ara Pacis was dug out in pieces over four centuries and rebuilt several hundred metres from where it stood; Etemenanki is a flooded hole in the ground. Each page states its condition in the header.
The Aegean and the Greek world
Temple and sanctuary building · Standing ruin
The Parthenon
A temple with almost no straight lines in it, paid for out of an alliance's treasury, blown apart in 1687 by a Venetian mortar shell finding an Ottoman powder store.
Temple and sanctuary building · Standing ruin
The Erechtheion
A temple built on three levels around an olive tree, a salt spring and a king's tomb, because the cults it had to contain would not fit a rectangle — and finished during a war Athens was losing.
Temple and sanctuary building · Standing
The Temple of Hephaestus
The most complete Greek temple standing anywhere, roof included — because it was a church for twelve hundred years, and then Greece's first national museum.
Building for spectacle · Standing ruin
The Theatre of Dionysus
Where Greek tragedy was first performed — and where almost nothing a modern visitor sees is old enough to have watched it happen.
Temple and sanctuary building · Standing ruin
The Temple of Apollo at Delphi
The building the oracle worked in, rebuilt three times, once by an exiled Athenian family who paid for a marble front they had only contracted to build in limestone — and bought a city with it.
Temple and sanctuary building · Standing ruin
The Temple of Zeus at Olympia
The temple built to hold one of the Seven Wonders, and now a field of column drums lying in the order an earthquake dropped them.
Civic building · Re-erected in modern times
The Treasury of the Athenians
A small marble building on the Sacred Way whose walls carry the oldest substantial piece of written music that survives from anywhere.
Gateway · Standing
The Lion Gate
The oldest monumental sculpture in Europe still standing where it was set, and the heads are missing because they were made separately out of something worth taking.
Tomb and funerary monument · Standing
The Treasury of Atreus
A corbelled dome fourteen metres across under a lintel of a hundred and twenty tonnes, robbed in antiquity, named after a man there is no evidence it held.
The Roman world
Building for spectacle · Standing ruin
The Colosseum
Built on the drained lake of Nero's private palace, out of the spoils of the Jewish war — a building whose politics are legible in its site and its funding before anyone looks at the architecture.
Temple and sanctuary building · Standing
The Pantheon
The largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built, carrying an inscription that names the wrong man — and standing intact because it became a church.
Civic building · Standing
The Curia Julia
The Roman Senate's meeting hall, standing to its full height because it spent thirteen centuries as a church — and seating about half the Senate, which is a fact about how the body actually worked.
Civic building · Foundations and plan
The Basilica Julia
The largest hall on the Forum, where four panels of judges sat at once and where the litigants' friends applauded — reduced now to a pavement, some pier stumps and the game boards scratched by people waiting.
Temple and sanctuary building · Standing ruin
The Temple of Saturn
Eight mismatched columns at the foot of the Capitol, one of them installed upside down — and beneath them the podium that held the Roman state treasury.
Temple and sanctuary building · Standing ruin
The Temple of Castor and Pollux
Vowed on a battlefield, dedicated by the vower's son, and used for two centuries as a speaker's platform, a bank and a bureau of weights and measures — the three columns everyone photographs are the Forum's clearest case of a temple as public infrastructure.
Commemorative monument · Standing
The Arch of Titus
A single-bay arch to a dead and deified emperor, carrying the only Roman image of the Jerusalem temple's furniture being carried through Rome — and restored in 1821 in a way that shows exactly which stones are modern.
Commemorative monument · Standing
The Arch of Constantine
Built largely out of other emperors' monuments, with their faces recut as Constantine's, and inscribed with a victory won by the prompting of a divinity the text declines to name.
Commemorative monument · Standing
Trajan's Column
A hundred and ninety metres of continuous narrative spiralling up a column nobody could read from the ground, over a burial chamber holding the ashes of the emperor it commemorates.
Civic building · Foundations and plan
The Forum of Trajan
The last and largest of the imperial fora, which astonished an emperor two centuries later — and which now lies mostly under a road built in 1932.
Civic building · Foundations and plan
The Forum of Augustus
A square lined with statues of Rome's great men, closed by a temple to Mars the Avenger vowed before a battle forty years earlier — and with an irregular boundary because some owners would not sell.
Commemorative monument · Re-erected in modern times
The Ara Pacis Augustae
An altar voted by the Senate, dug out of waterlogged ground under a palace in pieces over four centuries, reassembled for a Fascist anniversary, and now standing several hundred metres from where it was built.
Bath building · Standing ruin
The Baths of Caracalla
Vaults sixty metres up over a hall the size of a cathedral, heated by furnaces that consumed forests, and stripped in the sixteenth century to furnish a papal family's sculpture collection.
Egypt
Tomb and funerary monument · Standing
The Great Pyramid of Giza
Two and a quarter million blocks on a base levelled to a couple of centimetres across thirteen acres, containing three chambers, no body, and one painted inscription naming the king.
Tomb and funerary monument · Standing
The Step Pyramid of Djoser
The first large stone building in the world, put up by a man whose name survives on a statue base of his own king — and built as a copy in stone of an architecture made of reeds and mud.
Temple and sanctuary building · Standing
The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak
A hundred and thirty-four columns under a stone roof lit by clerestory windows — the same lighting principle a Roman basilica would reach fifteen centuries later, arrived at independently.
Temple and sanctuary building · Standing
Luxor Temple
A temple with a working mosque built into its courtyard eight metres above the ancient floor, a Roman legionary chapel painted over its sanctuary, and one of its obelisks in Paris.
Temple and sanctuary building · Moved from its site
The Great Temple at Abu Simbel
Cut into a cliff in Nubia with four twenty-metre colossi at the door, and cut out of it again in the 1960s, block by block, to escape a lake.
Temple and sanctuary building · Re-erected in modern times
The Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut
Three colonnaded terraces set against a cliff, built for a king who was a woman and then systematically erased from the walls by her successor — decades later, and probably not out of hatred.
Mesopotamia and Iran
Palace and audience hall · Standing ruin
The Apadana at Persepolis
An audience hall of seventy-two columns twenty metres tall, approached by stairs carved with twenty-three delegations bringing tribute — an empire's picture of itself, burned by Alexander.
Gateway · Standing ruin
The Gate of All Nations
Xerxes' entrance to the terrace, guarded by colossal bulls and bull-men, and covered in the names of nineteenth-century travellers who carved them into it.
Palace and audience hall · Standing ruin
The Palace of Darius
The best-preserved building at Persepolis, because it burned less — its polished black doorframes still standing to full height, with the king carved leaving each room.
Tomb and funerary monument · Standing
The Tomb of Cyrus
A gabled stone chamber on six steps, standing complete in an empty plain — the oldest free-standing stone monument in Iran, and the only Achaemenid royal tomb that is a building rather than a hole in a cliff.
Tomb and funerary monument · Standing
The Tomb of Darius I
The only Achaemenid rock tomb whose occupant is named by its own inscriptions — and the one that carries the king's statement of what a ruler should be.
Gateway · Moved from its site
The Ishtar Gate
A glazed brick gate of Babylon that now stands in Berlin — the smaller of its two arches, reassembled from excavated fragments with modern brick filling the gaps.
Temple and sanctuary building · Nothing stands
Etemenanki
A ziggurat known from a square hole in the ground, a late clay tablet giving its dimensions, and a Greek traveller's description — and the building the Tower of Babel story is usually attached to.
Covered elsewhere
Subjects that look like monuments and already have a page. A second one would say the same things for the same query, so this layer links rather than duplicating, and the validator fails the build if a deferral points at something that does not exist.
The Behistun monument
The archaeology layer already treats Behistun as a rock monument, because that is what it is: a relief and an inscription on a cliff with no building attached. That page covers the carving, the trilingual text, Rawlinson's copying, the decipherment and the succession dispute. A monument page would repeat it for the same query.
The Roman Forum as a whole
The Forum is a square with buildings in it, not a building. Its individually meaningful structures have monument pages — the Curia Julia, the Basilica Julia, the Temple of Saturn, the Temple of Castor and Pollux, the Arch of Titus — and the square itself is an excavated site.
The Acropolis of Athens as a whole
A fortified rock carrying several buildings. The Parthenon, the Erechtheion and the Propylaia are monuments; the rock, its Persian destruction deposit and its excavation history are a site.
Hadrian's Villa
A hundred and twenty hectares containing dozens of structures whose ancient names are a sixteenth-century guess. Treating it as one monument would give the Renaissance naming a permanence the evidence does not support.
The Roman aqueducts
Covered as a building type with named examples. No single aqueduct on this platform yet carries the patron, dating and political argument a monument page needs; the Pont du Gard is the obvious future candidate.
How to read the evidence labels
- Evidence level: Documented
- Supported by a named primary text or by excavated material evidence.
- Evidence level: Probable
- Supported by strong inference that most specialists accept.
- Evidence level: Disputed
- Substantial specialist disagreement exists; competing readings are stated.
- Evidence level: Literary
- Belongs to poetic or mythological construction rather than to history.
- Evidence level: Mythological
- Belongs to shared religious or mythic tradition rather than to any single text.
- Evidence level: Unknown
- The available evidence is insufficient to decide.
These labels describe the status of the evidence, not our confidence in a conclusion. A claim marked Literary is not a claim we doubt; it is a claim about what kind of thing a poem is.