Technologies of the Roman Empire were both highly innovative and practical. Often, Roman craftsmanship demonstrated stunning creativity, massive feats for a culture which came into being before the birth of Christianity. Here we'll explore technologies from the Roman Empire that were essentially lost to history, leaving us to try to piece back together how, or in the case of the Roman dodecahedron, why, they were created in the first place.
We'll also include some honorable mentions of technologies not fully lost, but subsumed into greater advancements still in use today. Among Rome's most remarkable and most thoroughly lost innovations was "opus caementicium", Roman concrete. Unlike the concrete used in modern construction, which begins to crack and degrade within decades, Roman concrete has endured for two millennia.
