As I understand it - which is not at all - the pyramid complex in Giza was always next to a bustling inhabited city, but the complex itself seemingly went ignored/untouched for centuries. Same goes for famous Roman sites. Why were these objects and sites not reused or maintained or destroyed until relatively recently? Where did everyone go, and why weren’t they living in and around these structures this whole time? And if they were, why didn’t they do anything with the sites?

I understand that empires and civilisations come to an end, but they aren’t the result of wholesale genocide, and even if they were, the genociders would surely move into that area next and continue living in the pre-built cities and towns. But that doesn’t seem to be what happened.

Why is humanity out of the picture in these monumental and impressive sites for unbroken periods of deep time?

Cheers!

  • klu9@lemmy.caEnglish
    7·
    5 days ago

    In addition to the points others made, Rome has not always been a bustling city.

    Its population declined from more than a million in AD 210 to 500,000 in AD 273 to 35,000 after the Gothic War (535–554) reducing the sprawling city to groups of inhabited buildings interspersed among large areas of ruins, vegetation, vineyards and market gardens.

    The city’s population declined to less than 50,000 people in the Early Middle Ages from 700 AD onward. It continued to stagnate or shrink until the Renaissance.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#Middle_Ages

    Thanks to multiple sackings, power struggles, plagues etc.

    It only surpassed a million again in 1936. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#Demographics

      • klu9@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        I don’t know but my speculation:

        • Europe’s economy (from which the Church’s income was largely derived) didn’t go into overdrive until the Renaissance / Columbus landing in America.
        • That growth being offset by the Reformation, with a lot of Europeans leaving the Roman Catholic Church.
        • The somewhat decentralized nature of the Church, with a lot of assets in the hands of monastic orders and semi-autonomous archbishoprics.
        • Perhaps an absolutist theocratic monarchy is not the most conducive form of government for economic and population growth.

        The population started to tick up with the Renaissance, but when Italy essentially unified under a more modern constitutional monarchy in 1861, ending the Pope’s temporal power over the city, Rome’s population growth went stratospheric.

        Source: https://www.jetpunk.com/users/quizmaster/charts/population-of-rome-over-time