Hunting Baths
at Leptis Magna (200)
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Architect: Unknown
Location: Leptis Magna, Libya
Style: Roman vernacular
Materials: Limestone, concrete
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“The distinguished archeologist Mortimer Wheeler (1890-1976) argued that the Roman passion for cleanliness — and the construction of public bathhouses throughout the Roman empire — stimulated the development of spacious interiors. The Hunting Baths are plain, squat, domed, and vaulted buildings resembling modern industrial units — the name comes from frescoes depicting men baiting leopards and other wild animals in the vaulted main hall. The baths were built at the end first century at a time when Emperor Septimius Severus was
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“It is the astonishing reach of the Roman mind that compels the imagination.”
Mortimer Wheeler, archeologist
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lavishing money rebuilding his birthplace. The Severan expansion of the city created suburbs that needed their own baths. The Hunting Baths were originally surrounded by seaside villas.
The almost complete survival of these baths is extraordinary and is partly to be explained by the resistance of Roman concrete. The Hunting Baths’s long, barrel-vaulted roofs and dome were fashioned in concrete that was laid, not poured as is usual with modern concrete. The contemporaneous dome of the Pantheon in Rome was made in the same way. The Hunting Baths demonstrate that concrete roofing was quite commonplace in the late Roman era. Domes and barrel-vaulted roofs were widely adopted after the fall of the Roman empire, but concrete was not reinvented until the twentieth century.” (MC)
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