Tag Archives: Ancient Rome

July 2, 2013 · 1:16 pm

Video for the Classroom: A Tour through Ancient Rome, courtesy of Khan Academy and Rome Reborn

This is the type of history video Khan Academy needs!

A Tour Through Ancient Rome is a collaboration between Khan and the Rome Reborn project, an initiative to create digital models of Rome from its foundation settlements to its depopulated self during the 6th century CE. This tour is narrated mostly by Rome Reborn director and University of Virginia professor Dr. Bernard Frischer.

The video juxtaposes a magnificent digital rendering of ancient Rome around the year 320 to various modern and ancient images of artifacts, buildings and ruins. Dr. Frischer’s narrative contains none of the boring, linear, rote stock pedantics of other Khan humanities videos. In fact, for a 14-minute video lecture, it’s surprisingly fun to watch.

Khan Academy had better take note: if it wants its history and humanities videos to get the same hits as its math and science films, it had better quit the light-pen Chinese takeout menu-look that it thrives upon and make the videos actually ENGAGING.

…I mean, God forbid kids actually ENJOY learning about history.

Videos for the Classroom: A Day in the Life…from BBC History

As we here at the Neighborhood sit patiently while Governor Cuomo calls us for an interview, I found this cool series of videos.

In my year teaching ancient history, the BBC has been a veritable lifeline, along with National Geographic, Discovery Channel and PBS. BBC’s History site is particularly instructive, in that it includes games, projects, lessons and dense (REALLY dense) readings on many important aspects of history–mostly from a British perspective, obviously, but it works.

“A Day in the Life…” is a series of short videos about a kid’s point of view through British history. Since Ancient Rome is on the menu to end the year, I’ve included the life of Roman kid in Roman Britain. It isn’t entirely accurate, but it is fun, and cool to share with kids for a laugh.

You can go to BBC History for this and other videos.

ORBIS: The Coolest Map of the Roman Empire Ever, thanks to Stanford University

ORBIS view, courtesy of Stanford University

If all roads led to Rome, then how many roads must a man walk down to get to Rome…

or Athens…or Alexandria…or Jerusalem for that matter?

The folks at our west coast Ivy, Stanford University, came up with one of the most interesting solutions to this problem.

Meet ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Model of the Roman World. In layman’s terms, meet the Google Maps of the Roman Empire.

ORBIS was designed by a team of historians, classicists and IT specialists. Walter Scheidel, a Roman historian in the Classics and History departments, painstakingly mapped out roads, routes, sea lanes, settlements, obstacles, mountain passes, and anything else used for transportation in the Roman world. His research further helped calculate distances, travel times, travel costs, adjustments for wind currents, altitude, population…just about anything you need to travel around 200 CE.

With IT experts Elijah Meeks, Karl Grossner and Naomi Alvarez, Scheidel and company created a model that calculates time and cost for various transportation routes throughout the Empire. According to their website, ORBIS uses about 751 sites (cities, towns and prominent landmarks), of which 268 are sea ports. There are 84,631 kilometers (52,587 miles) of roads and desert tracks, 28,272 kilometers (17,567 miles) of navigable rivers and canals, as well as 900 sea routes which averages a total distance of 180,033 kilometers (111,864 miles).

Never mind all that. I had loads of fun playing with the ORBIS mapping application.

One of the tabs is Mapping ORBIS, which allows someone to map a distance between Roman settlements using various forms of transportation. For example, to travel from Rome to Londinium (today’s London) in January, on foot or on riverboat, would take about 41.8 days covering 2436 kilometers. It also gives shipping and travel costs in denarii, or Roman currency, per kilogram of wheat by donkey (25.53), by wagon (31.46), or per passenger in a carriage (a whopping 1624.24). ORBIS even provides the settlements where you stop along the way.

I cannot wait to use ORBIS in my class when the Ancient Rome unit gets around. This application is an incredible tool for the classroom, especially for students that still cannot get around the complexities of travel in the ancient world. ORBIS provides, using the most accurate research, a first-hand look at travel in the Third Century CE.

Please let me know how you’re doing with it…and make sure to tell them the Neighborhood sent you. Enjoy.