r/interesting • u/brainland • 17h ago
HISTORY I can't understand why ancient doors were so big
Is it still a thing?
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u/Odd_Forever_8369 17h ago
The doors and the gates were big and intricately designed to let the people coming from the outside know the grandeur and the power of the rulers.
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u/Deporncollector 16h ago
My mind set was.
Big door = heavy
Heavy = hard to push
Hard to push = safe.
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u/Adorable_Challenge37 15h ago
Palms = sweaty
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u/Hot_Dog2376 11h ago
Mom = spaghetti
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u/Nellie_07 11h ago
Knees = weak
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u/Easy_Entrepreneur_46 11h ago
Arms = heavy
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u/Baumarius 11h ago
Palms = spaghetti
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u/millennialoser 11h ago
Hips = broad
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u/bcjones 11h ago
Mono = One
Rail = Rail50
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u/LumpyBuy8447 11h ago
Ring came off = pudding can
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u/Mountain-Ad-8003 8h ago
Pen knife = good man
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u/Bright-Pilot-3970 12h ago
Also makes moving furniture easier. Imagine getting something to the 10000 pound door and being like, well fuck it’s about an inch and a half too big, we have to take the fucking door off to get it in.
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u/Shifty269 10h ago
Having gotten a new couch recently, I was reminded of my life long architectural beef. Why aren't doors a little bit wider? I don't care what the actual reason is. We know how big furniture is. We've all had to move stuff through a doorway. French doors get it. Hell, a lot of residential doors can barely fit an average american let alone a love seat. Also handles on furniture. They do it for pianos. Why not everything else. Put them on the back we won't see them. We've had thousands of years to get this shit right.
Thank you for listening to my TED...x talk
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u/Bright-Pilot-3970 10h ago
Removable handles on furniture would be pretty awesome. As you said, the handle can be on in the back or something but you can remove it when you’re done.
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u/Head_Razzmatazz7174 7h ago
I've got an upright piano that I need to get out of my house. It's in the living room and I already know we are going to have to take off the door, frame, and the wooden threshold to get it out. And it's still going to be a tight fit.
Now I just need to hire a crew and a truck to get it moved.
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u/Uncle-Osteus 6h ago
I have some good news for you then: there is no truly standard width for modern doors. There are common sizes but they actually come in almost every imaginable width. I rented a house once where the exterior basement door was like 60 inches wide lol
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16h ago edited 11h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/JungleOrAfk 15h ago
What about a small door that uses the same amount of wood, so its like 2m thick 👀 a chode door if you will
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u/HorrorMakesUsHappy 14h ago
We have those. There are circular ones and rectangular ones.
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u/aerdvarkk 11h ago
Actually those door would be easy to open/close. They are likely on tracks engineered to be opened using gears or a pulley system. If not, then they'd be impractical to have in place to begin with. So despite the grand displays of the ruling powers, it was also a security mechanism.
But yes pushing them manually would take more effort than reality would allow.
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u/Trigonn 10h ago
These particular doors (the Pantheon in Rome) are actually quite famous because they CAN be opened by a single person with ease. There isn't any sort of gear/pulley system, they're just extremely well balanced on a pivot that allows them to be opened with ease despite weighing 8 tons each. Cool stuff!
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u/Ok-Log7784 9h ago
I think someone said it right earlier. They are meant to be the house of the gods. We are meant to marvel at the grandeur and be humbled at this holy place. When I went to Rome I was in awe of the achievement. That place definitely makes you think. Also, the deli outside of those doors has sandwiches worthy of the gods.
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u/Raus-Pazazu 16h ago
Also horses.
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u/Angry_Robot 15h ago
Giant horse, 5 times taller than modern horses.
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u/Available_Leather_10 15h ago
Trojan, even, one might say.
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u/Phraaaaaasing 4h ago
Architecture and design has always been sensitive to ratios and proportions—if something needed to be a wide entryway (for multiple horses) simply having a 15 foot tall door that was 50 feet wide would invalidate the expected proportions, especially since they were likely connected to walls to prevent climbers or latterly to simply go over them.
The result is tall, tall, walls with a very wide entryway and a proportionally tall doorway (maybe should be called a gateway) that could allow an entire house or apartment through—to maintain pleasing portions.
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u/Speldenprikje 15h ago
'grandeur' thew me off for a bit. 'deur' means door in Dutch lol.
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u/menos_es_mas 17h ago edited 4h ago
The size was meant to impress/intimidate the people walking thru the door.
[EDIT: this comment blew up and a gazillion people replied that it's for horses/elephants/soldiers etc. This is the door to the Pantheon, which was originally a pagan temple and then a church. There is no record of animals ever being allowed inside, nor was it meant for armies. Also, if you want a large crowd to pass through, you need a wide door. A door that's an impressive 24.7 feet tall but only 14.6 feet wide isn't a great ingress/egress route for a crowd.]
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u/CATNIP_IS_CRACK 16h ago edited 13h ago
More importantly they aren’t and never were “doors”. They’re mass gateways that crowds can move through that use the same design as a traditional door for that reason. The doors of a god, a king, etc for the masses to awe at, a display of power and wealth, when in reality they’re just a swinging gate no different than a draw gate.
You don’t use standard sized doors when you have a crowd of hundreds or thousands of people entering and leaving at the same time, you use gateways. We regularly have similar entries to buildings like stadiums, convention centers, churches, etc to this day. They just typically roll up, to the side, or slide because of modern architecture and ease of use. You use the normal sized side doors when people are coming or going regularly. You open the gateway when you’re letting a crowd in and out.
Edit: Seems like all the people commenting on the higher couldn’t actually be bothered to read the comment…
Edit 2: Somehow people are still commenting on how width doesn’t explain the height and can’t be bothered to actually read the comment… The comments talking about the doors being sized for real giants that wouldn’t fit in the actual building are a little humorous.
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u/SoylentGrunt 15h ago
Architecture as a control. Awe = Humility. Sometimes it's why insitutions such as churches and courthouses and statehouses are "over the top". To beat it into your head that they're in control and not you. Sometimes it's meant to convey stability. Either way it's a larger than life power trip that resides adjacent to iconography and mythology. McDonald's and their early days giant Golden Arches comes under this heading. Plus big doors move more people faster.
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u/Feisty-Tooth-7397 14h ago
Don't forget they used to also ride horses and carry standards and such, sometimes if it was a door into a city they needed the extra height for transporting large items, carts loaded with goods.
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u/Sporner100 13h ago
Also also, doors that are wider than high look ugly.
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u/Temporary_Hat7330 13h ago
Architecture as control is itself probably too elaborate an explanation. People like beautiful things. They like things that are large, impressive, expensive, and permanent, and they like to associate themselves with those things. Wealth naturally produces splendor, and splendor naturally produces awe. A church, courthouse, or statehouse may be imposing partly because institutions want to communicate permanence and importance, but it may also simply be the same old human impulse that produces palaces, monuments, gardens, and expensive houses: if you have the resources to make something magnificent, why not make it magnificent?
The giant Golden Arches are an even simpler example. You don't need a theory of architectural domination to explain them. McDonald's wanted people to see McDonald's. A giant, distinctive, attractive structure is an advertisement. It catches your eye, makes the business memorable, and tells you that something important is there. The fact that it later became an icon doesn't require a deeper explanation.
The mistake is assuming that because we can deconstruct something into a theory of power, that theory must be the thing that explains why it exists/existed. That's often just a modern mythology of our own, we take an ordinary human preference for beauty, grandeur, status, symbolism, and practical utility, and retrospectively translate it into a story about hidden systems of control.
Sometimes a big door is just a big door. Sometimes it is beautiful because people like beautiful things. Sometimes a building is imposing because the people who built it wanted to impress you. And sometimes the simplest explanation is the most human one, people have always enjoyed making impressive things and being impressed by them.
Occam’s Razor…
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u/BreakfastBeneficial4 12h ago
It’s a well-studied concept.
Here’s an article about it:
https://www.thecollector.com/what-did-fascist-architecture-look-like/
Only thing I’d disagree with from OP is that the Golden Arches belong in the same class of ideology. Those were meant to make kids scream “MCDONALDS!!”
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u/Temporary_Hat7330 12h ago
This article is exactly what I am talking about; it overreaches and pcreates a myth about reality. Saying, “Fascist regimes deliberately used architecture as political symbolism” is a historical fact. Saying, “Fascist architecture therefore had a coherent aesthetic whose purpose was to belittle the individual and express oppression through monumentality” is a retrospective interpretation and myth making.
Hitler and Mussolini absolutely did use architecture deliberately to project political power, permanence, national unity, and historical destiny, so there is a genuine historical fact underneath this magazine article’s (it’s not a study or research) argument. Both regimes consciously appropriated monumental scale, classical imagery, symmetry, Roman references, and in Italy even modernist and rationalist forms to construct a visual mythology of the state. Where your annd the article’s argument overreaches is in turning that historical fact into a general theory of “fascist architecture,” as though monumentality itself naturally expresses fascist oppression or exists primarily to “belittle the individual.”
Monumental architecture long predates fascism and has been used by empires, monarchies, republics, churches, universities, and modern states both socialist and democratic to communicate permanence, authority, stability, civic identity, and collective purpose. Even Fascist Italy itself undermines the article’s neat narrative, since it embraced both classical monumentality and avant garde Modernism (which is the picture of the geometric square buildings shown), including highly rationalist buildings such as Terragni’s Casa del Fascio.
The defensible claim, then, is that Hitler and Mussolini consciously used existing architectural languages for fascist political ends; the overreach is treating those architectural forms as inherently fascist or retroactively assigning a single psychological function to them, such as suppressing individuality. That turns a complicated historical phenomenon into a tidy moral metanarrative, aka a myth, that Fascism produces monumental architecture, monumental architecture diminishes the individual, therefore the architecture itself reveals the oppressive essence of Fascism. The first part is historical; the latter is interpretation masquerading as inevitability.
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u/MotherFatherOcean 7h ago
I feel like I just earned a Ph.D. by reading and contemplating this comment, which inspires awe at least as much as that door does.
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u/WagnersRing 14h ago
Notre Dame is my favorite example. It was built to show Paris and the church as the dominant force in Europe.
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u/AnoutherThatArtGuy 14h ago
Yeap for sure a thing. I live in NZ and we don't have anything remotely big/awe thats man made. I went to the imperial palace in Japan and immediately understood what feeling small must of felt like to those that visited the emperor during feudal Japan. Same with the Shoguns palace as well.
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u/Straight_Can_5297 15h ago
There is some debate to the Pantheon actual function but roman/greek temples were not supposed to admit large crowds. The neoclassical 19th century palace I work in has a large gate which is a lot taller than anything that might gave to go under it: this way the arch on top of it connects to the bottom of the upper floor and looks better than would be otherwise.
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u/SpiderSlitScrotums 15h ago
This is an important point about the ancient Roman religion that most people don’t understand. The temple was only for the elite. Everyone else did their religious business outside of it. As an orthopraxic religion, there was no need for things like sermons to promote faith and belief for commoners. What mattered was that the proper rituals were observed and that the proper sacrifices were performed.
Contrast this with Christianity. As an orthodoxic religion, what people believed mattered. So they needed large public buildings to indoctrinate people. One design, the basilica, was based off of Roman courts and assembly buildings, which could house large numbers of people.
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u/BitterPilled_ 16h ago
Issa door
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u/ModifiedGas 16h ago
Mordor
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u/slickCCsunshine 16h ago
Hodor
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u/R7ype 16h ago
Gondor
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u/Living_Morning94 14h ago
The natives greeted me at the door full of splendor
though they complained about my odor
my questions were answered with candor
but their smiles soon turned into horror
when I told them I am a conquistador10
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u/Into_The_Dusk 16h ago
On point. It also sends a message that the ancient gods are regular guests of such palaces.
Can you imagine that small plebian farmer being summoned to the king's palace, his first sight being those huge doors and the treasures behind them. Anything the ruler would ask of such simpletons would be like a heavenly injunction to be executed without a hint of objection.
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u/menos_es_mas 16h ago
Indeed. Someone else on this thread mentioned that it's a gateway for moving crowds, but I don't think that was the primary intent. If you want to move crowds, you'd make it wide. This thing is inordinately tall because it's meant to impress, and like you said, like it's meant for the gods.
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u/Borazon 15h ago
The early church forms, basilica where based on the more ancient Roman and Greek temples.
And those indeed often contain literal larger than life statues of the god that was worshipped. Zeus and Athena Parthenos were both 13m, with Zeus being even taller because he was seated.
I always felt that the door design was to hint at that. To make it seem more plausible that the god could have walked in and 'become' the statue.
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u/Murgatroyd314 11h ago
This was, in fact, one of the design principles. The door of a temple should be large enough that (the statue of) the god could, if it chose to, stand up and walk through the door. At least one Ancient Greek writer mocked a temple where the god would need to crawl out.
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u/Witty-Revolution8742 13h ago
Its hard to build wide doors in buildings structurally. A tall door allowed a large air flow into a building that didnt have any cooling.
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u/SmokedGecko 13h ago
Have you ever seen doors that were very wide but no taller than normal? That would be very weird
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u/Schavuit92 11h ago
Structurally a bad idea as well.
Instead, by making the door taller you're making the wall on top shorter, reducing the weight that sits on the doorframe.
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u/Goesonyournerves 17h ago
Now you know why i so many folklore giants were a thing. People once saw those doors and were just be like: "Yes here lived giants once"
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u/CATNIP_IS_CRACK 16h ago
That paired with the fact that human cultures have stories far older than written history that became millennias old games of telephone, the vast majority of humanity was still passing history orally rather than through writing up until the creation of the printing press and mass spread of literacy, and oral histories typically stop representing reality within decades let alone centuries or millennia of their origin.
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u/superschokokeks 16h ago
That's why I'm a little bit sceptical about the bible. I wonder what the original text was and how much it changed over the centuries.
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u/Shifty-Imp 16h ago
"A little bit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. 😂
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u/MongolianDonutKhan 16h ago
In "Misquoting Jesus" Bart Ehrman lays out the problems with the written record within the gospels. One of major issues he discusses is that text back then was transmitted via scribes copying other texts or taking dictation. The scribal process is just prone to error and deliberate changes that are hard to correct. This is why historians usually favor an older copy of a work as being closer to an original, but even then the better evaluation is how many times has the copy we have been copied? Also, some scribal sources are considered more reliable (read less prone to error and editing). I can't recall which city, but I think it was Alexandria that Ehrman considered particularly notorious to changes during copying.
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u/JJCB85 15h ago
Not to mention when they’re translating into a different language at the same time…
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u/Mejiro84 15h ago
And even in a single language, words can change meaning over time, or have differing meanings based off context. Or a passage might seem strange and mystical and some odd metaphor for the wise to puzzle over, but just actually be references and imagery that readers of the time would have known, but those meanings have faded. Like when we see 'the White House said...' we know that it's not a literal talking house but a reference to the US president, but when filtered through generations of people that don't know the context, the original meaning can get blurred!
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u/bobqjones 14h ago
Also greek didnt have punctuation. So translators for it had to decide things like translating a string like "godisnowhere" to either "god is now here" OR "god is nowhere", which rather changes the meaning of the phrase. Translating ancient languages is not as straightforward as youd think.
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u/TheUnicornFightsOn 16h ago edited 16h ago
My favorite professor in college was a Jesuit priest and in my early Christianity class, he told us don't ever forget that aside from its religious use, the Bible is a political document drafted over many decades by those in power at the time. They would argue and fight over which historical texts written long before the compiling began had the most credibility/relevance and should be included/excluded.
Interestingly, we read historical texts that narrowly missed being included even in the Catholic bible (which has seven extra books than most Protestant ones eg King James).
For instance, one of blackballed books described Jesus as a mischievous 10-year-old child setting fire to a thatch roof. (Notice we have few* stories of Jesus from when he's born until a full grown adult.)
Edit: No to Few
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u/PsyOpBunnyHop 15h ago
Tell me more tales of Firebug Jesus.
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u/bobqjones 14h ago
There was the whole "youre not my real dad" phase that you rarely ever hesr about.
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u/_learned_foot_ 14h ago
Why do I feel this is going to be close to a cherry tree type story, but damnit I want to hear because he may have been burning down a bank.
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u/GotGRR 16h ago
One of the most fascinating things about the Dead Sea Scrolls is that it gives a peak at how much and what's changed in the Old Testament since 300 BC.
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u/imunfair 15h ago
The bible hasn't really been around that long, it was assembled from a bunch of random scrolls by a bunch of groups like the council of nicaea between 300-400AD. That's why the apocrypha and other variations exist too.
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u/KamakaziDemiGod 16h ago
The Bible likely didn't change that much over time, but the stories they reused (stole) from preexisting religions and faiths were changed from their previous versions to fit Christianity. As religions go Christianity hasn't been around that long, and its mostly just a rehashing of other stories
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u/PsyOpBunnyHop 16h ago
I wonder how many parents told their kids bullshit stories just for a laugh, only for them to die and the kid grows up believing them to be truth, and these kids just spread the tales they've heard with each other.
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u/pur_noir 16h ago
and how do we know the old books we find are fact or fiction. imagine 10,000 years from now, someone dug up harry potter.
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u/Hangry_Squirrel 14h ago
If they dig up Harry Potter, chances are they'll also dig up some of the massive corpus of Harry Potter scholarship, which makes it clear that it's a work of fiction.
After all, we're not here debating whether Gilgamesh was real.
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u/Darryl_Lict 15h ago
I'm thinking that woman is just super tiny. Like 1 foot tall.
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u/theslimbox 1h ago
They are actually there so OP's mom could get into the temple.
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u/Real_pratzz 17h ago
Elephant
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u/duke_silver1466 17h ago
After you address the elephant in the room, it gotta move out for the next one.
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u/JonnyReece 16h ago
Elephant: "Phrrrrump!"
Host: "welcome sir, right this way"
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u/Forward-Mention-6598 15h ago
Dad joke after the first dad joke by duke silver which I don’t understand
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u/vtecdohcter 15h ago
Actually you addressed the elephant in the room...
They would leave the doors so big so that they could get things in and out of their grand hall..
Statues, replacement beams or stones, thrones etc
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u/AgreeablePhone6786 15h ago
High ranked nobles and huge animals needed enough space to get through the entryway
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u/Shy-Pangolin 16h ago
Elephants are way shorter than that
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u/MidnightAdventurer 15h ago
Ah, but what if you want to ride the elephant through the door?
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u/unfortunatehippo1960 15h ago
My thoughts were along those lines, but raiders on horseback need enough space to go through together!🤭
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u/MidnightAdventurer 15h ago
Riders on horseback with lances and banners held vertically are probably approaching 2/3 of the door height. It’s still a really big door though
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u/somersault_dolphin 15h ago
Not when you add a person on top, and then there's the howdah.
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u/ElderberryNational92 17h ago
Well when you bluff about having giants you have to commit to the bit if you want it to work
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u/AlexSmithsonian 16h ago
"I know you really want to invade our city. But how would you fare against Giants? Not real? Don't be ridiculous, why else would we build such massive doors!?"
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u/0mousse0 17h ago
Display of wealth, servants/guards/staff open it for you, giant furniture can easily fit inside, many people can enter and exit at once
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u/Khaliras 15h ago
It's crazy how far I had to scroll before the first multi-faceted comment.
So many definitive, one-dimensional reason responses in the thread, for something that has so many different purposes.
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u/SeattlePubCrawls 17h ago
Didn't you know, people used to be much bigger back then.
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u/Korean_Jesus111 16h ago
Some conspiracy theorists unironically believe this
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u/Secuter 17h ago
It's a tool of power to inspire and humble the subjects of the state.
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u/Machdame 17h ago
Carts and carriages. Some of the doors are made to accommodate vehicles for the upper class.
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u/Temporary_Hat_7310 17h ago
This tradition likely stems from the era when animal transport was the norm. Whether people arrived on camels or elephants, entrances had to adapt. A fascinating example of this lives on in Morocco, where traditional house doors feature multi-sized openings tailored to different types of visitors and livestock. As well as grand medieval fortress gates, for instance, were built on a massive scale so entire armies and mounted knights could pass through effortlessly.
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u/Witty-Stand888 16h ago
Cavalry carrying lances, banners, flags marching parade style through the entrance with blaring horns.
or
Giants with dragons on leashes.
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u/Pure-Independence430 6h ago
people used to be 7m tall back then, hope that helps!
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u/Connect-Bicycle-6897 17h ago
Main purpose was impression. Visitors have to feel small and insignificante.
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u/decentralised 16h ago
Same reason the ceilings were so high. To give the people a sense of grandeur and magnificence of the church, the ruler etc.
Conversely, common houses had smaller doors and lower ceilings than we’re used to these days.
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u/This_Lake5743 16h ago
A lot of those really oversized doors were for cathedrals, palaces, and also government buildings, you know. They were built so you kind of feel small, kind of irrelevant walking in, and that was pretty much the whole point. Power kind of communicates through size or scale, in a straight forward way.
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u/Effective_licker_27 17h ago
Ever walk through a giant entryway? Like say a stadium or a theme park entrance? Remember that feeling of shock and awe? Humans have loved that feeling for a while now. That; and being able to move a whole wall on a hinge/roller is nice.
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u/Luisstrada 15h ago
For the rituals where a crowd walks in the city bringing a big statue of the saint protector of that city.
There used to be more of those rituals called processions, they start at the church where the statue is taken and belonged around the city on the shoulder of some men, depending of the size of the statue, and ends in the church where the statue is brought back. Statutes were big and therefore big doors
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