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I'm a bit curious as to how someone would go about leveling a city prior to the invention of gunpowder. Would the Romans or Assyrians just torch a city and take an army of men with hammers to whatever the flames didn't get? How about things like demolition to allow for new city buildings?

Setzer wrote:I'm a bit curious as to how someone would go about leveling a city prior to the invention of gunpowder. Would the Romans or Assyrians just torch a city and take an army of men with hammers to whatever the flames didn't get? How about things like demolition to allow for new city buildings?

Yes. As most cities consisted of densely packed structures made primarily from wood, it was quite easy to start a fire, purposely or by accident, that could engulf all or most of a city. I would assume that any stone structures that survived the fire reasonably intact would be need to be taken apart piece by piece, if the conquers so desired. Although taking out support columns and like could make the job easier.

Ghetto Edit

Of course for civil demolition purposes they obviously wouldn't use fire due to safety concerns. The process would probably not be unlike how it is done today, sans explosives and heavy equipment. As a result it would probably be more time consuming and potentially more dangerous to the workers during the final stages, assuming of course they didn't just let slaves take the risk.

You only need explosives because of the immense size of modern buildings. Otherwise, the wrecking ball is more than sufficient. With primitive ancient buildings, they would have been mostly small enough to take apart with hammers and battering-ram type devices, and there would not be a significant danger from falling material because the structures weren't that high to begin with.

Now of course, we did have certain exceptions: special buildings which were unusually large. But even then, they weren't gargantuan like modern buildings; the Parthenon was less than 25m tall. The world is full of crappy cheap apartment buildings which are taller than that today. This limits the height from which material can fall, hence it limits the danger from poorly controlled demolition. Although I'm not sure how often they deliberately attempted controlled demolition of such special structures anyway.

Plus, one could easily use a team of oxen and chain/rope attached to support beams to demolish most buildings.

Usually if you tore down a building more then 50-100 years ago you attempted to salvage absolutely as much material as possible because stuff was expensive. Wood might be burned, but only so that you could salvage the nails and other metal fasteners. So in general you would want to slowly dismantle a masonry structure rather then just destroying it. Even today we do lots of salvage, and while in the west brick and concrete just go in the trash, the Chinese actually go so far as to collect every last piece of rebar for recycling. This is facilitated by having hundreds of millions of people you can pay two dollars a day to do it.

It is said that Carthage burned for around two weeks when the Romans destroyed it, so fire for the soft bits. The walls and stone structures they would have demolished probably by a combination of pulling them down, or knocking them down from the top, stone-by-stone. It still is pretty labour-intensive, but with a couple of legions and the (unwilling) civil population to help you out, you do have a lot of people.

In case of Jerusalem the Romans dug up the foundations of the city walls as well, so they're willing to go even further than that.

In many cases that's far more extreme than the gunpowder age destructions. Conwy castle in Wales for example was slighted by having had only one section destroyed and the rest of the castle is still mostly intact.

Also keep in mind that a lot of the buildings were not built out of stone back then. In fact, the Romans are notorious for having a larger ratio of stone:wood than other cultures. Most cultures used mostly bricks or clay or some other material that was not as resisting as stone to fire.

In that case, just deporting the population and just torching the place will do the trick, as without maintenance and with fire damage the city will be gone pretty quickly.