History
Roman legend related that Romulus, when he founded the city, had a circular pit dug in the Forum. The first fruits of the year were thrown into this pit as a sacrifice and all new citizens of Rome had to throw in a handful of dirt from their place of origin.
The Mundus (Latin, “world”), known only from literary sources, was an underground structure considered a gate to the underworld. It may be that the Umbilicus Urbis Romae was the external (above ground) part of the subterranean Mundus. The Mundus was ritually opened only three times each year. These days were considered dies nefasti—days on which official transactions were forbidden on religious grounds—because evil spirits of the underworld were thought to escape then.
The original masonry Umbilicus was probably constructed in the 2nd century BC. The existing ruins, however, are from the time of the Emperor Septimius Severus. The construction of his triumphal arch in 203 AD encroached upon the ancient Umbilicus, which was recreated to allow more space. Fragments of the older monument were used in the new one.
The Umbilicus is believed to be a separate structure from the Milliarium Aureum, which was built nearby by Augustus (c. 20 BC) and served much the same purpose for distance reference.
-
Entrance to the brick structure
Read more about this topic: Umbilicus Urbis Romae
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)