9d - Building and townplanning

Summary

In various forms the Hellenistic architectural tradition flourished over a very wide area, and many Hellenistic buildings and complexes survived relatively intact through later antiquity. Thus extant Hellenistic structures far outnumber those of earlier Greek periods; moreover, the body of known material is constantly growing as a result of new discoveries. Nevertheless, Hellenistic architectural chronology is often imprecise. In the Syro-Palestinian region few major monuments are firmly dated before the first century B.C.; and in Egypt, apart from a few important temple-complexes, and a series of Alexandrian tombs commencing not later than 300, the record is fragmentary, and many dates uncertain. Students must therefore rely mainly on evidence from Greece, the Aegean and Western Anatolia, and on the Italo-Hellenistic style that flourished west of the Adriatic. The Western monuments are also important for their influence on Rome, and through Rome on the Italian Renaissance.

Hellenistic townplanning

From the second quarter of the fourth century onward kings and local dynasts of the Eastern Mediterranean founded an unprecedented number of new cities with grid-plans of classical Hippodamian type. Since urban traffic consisted mostly of pedestrians and pack-animals, ancient cities, regardless of terrain, required few main thoroughfares for wheeled traffic, and secondary lanes could be sloping ramps, or even stepped. Regular grids, however, facilitated both ‘zoning’ and division into blocks of uniform size and shape, and thus occur in the vast majority of classical and Hellenistic foundations.

Such plans were very convenient for the inhabitants, but had virtually no ‘open spaces’. Moreover, the generally windowless façades flanking the long straight streets must have been quite monotonous.