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Updated: May 1, 2025
But references to the town in papyri denote four quarters of it by various letters, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and distinguish its house-blocks by the term Plintheion with a numeral attached. Thus, a house is described as lying 'in the letter Delta and the Plintheion 7'. Our documents show that there were in Antinoê at least eleven of these Plintheia.
Again the evidence proves rectangular town-planning in broad outline; excavation alone can tell the rest. Zeitschrift des deutschen Palãstina-Vereins, xxv , plate 6; Bãdeker, Palestine and Syria , p. 140. For the neighbouring Bostra, see p. 136. In the towns just described a distinctive feature is the 'chess-board' pattern of streets and rectangular house-blocks.
In the period of the dying Republic and nascent Empire fewer 'coloniae' were planted here than in the north, while in much of southern Italy towns have in all ages been comparatively rare. Beloch, Campanien, p. 252. In the towns just noted we can trace many, though not all, of the original house-blocks.
The town, he says, was divided lengthways by four streets and crossways by three. Plainly, therefore, it had a definite and rectangular street-planning, though the brevity of the historian does not enable us to decide how many house-blocks it had and how far the lesser streets were symmetrical with these seven principal thoroughfares.
The Roman towns which we are now considering show two varieties of house-blocks. Sometimes the blocks are square; sometimes, perhaps more often, they are oblong approximating to a square, like the blocks of Priene. But in a few cases, as at Naples among the more ancient, and at Carthage among the later foundations, they are oblong and the oblongs are very long and narrow.
Over the débris of Numantine liberty a little Roman town grew up. But it is hardly mentioned save in one or two road-books. Yet it enjoyed some form of municipal status and its streets and houses show to the excavator traces of Roman town-planning. The streets ran parallel or at right angles to one another; the house-blocks measured some 50 yds. square. Schulten, Abhandlungen der k.
The house-blocks divided by these streets were thought to vary somewhat in size but to measure in general about 300 x 330 metres. More recent research, however, has not confirmed Mahmud's plans. The excavations of Mr. Hogarth and M. Botti suggest that many of his lines are wrong and that even his Canopic Street is incorrectly laid down. Mr.
There must have been not three but four rows of house-blocks from south-west to north-east; the graves once noted in this quarter must be older than our Herculaneum or otherwise unconnected with it. The whole town must have been 40 or 45 rather than 25 acres in area. Even so it is a little town. The unenthusiastic references to it in ancient literature are, after all, truthful.
The interior of the town was divided by streets into a chess-board pattern of small square house-blocks; from north to south there were twelve such blocks and from east to west eleven not twelve, as is often stated. The possible total of 132 'insulae' was, however, diminished by the space needed for public buildings, though it is not easy to tell how great this space was in the original town.
But save in so far as Milchhöfer's plans reproduce the Piraeus of B.C. 450 or 400, we cannot discern either the shape or the size of the house-blocks, or the grouping adopted for any of the ordinary buildings, or the scheme of the ordinary roads. We may even wonder whether such things were of much account in the town-planning of that period.
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