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31 points

Was there any advantage to having it lean like that?

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64 points

In defensive terms, no, not really. They had to build it like this because these aren’t really walls per se, it’s just brick lining on the outside of an earthen mound, and mounds are, well, mound-shaped. https://gomadnomad.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Bukharas-Ark-Palace.jpg

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10 points

It would’ve made siege ladders harder to set up.

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8 points

Who needs siege ladders when you can just climb up the damn wall?

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3 points

You’d think there’d be a reason beyond construction requirements, though—otherwise someone in the past 1,500 years would have replaced it with a more conventional wall.

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10 points

They did. This is only the oldest, innermost fortification in the city. AFAIK additional layers of walls were build around it later.

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8 points

Is it a lean, or is it wider at the bottom?

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8 points

This question confuses me geometrically

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11 points

is it \ or △ shaped ?

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7 points

Not this one, but newer forts were built with angled walls to help protect against canon balls and the like.

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2 points

But there the walls were still vertical to the ground yeah?

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10 points
7 points

Harder to knock down or undermine?

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6 points
*

You’d think it would lean the other way to make bit harder to climb.

Edit: or this could be a view from the inside. Or maybe the goal is to keep people in rather than out.

Edit again: none of these things seem true according to Wikipedia. It’s curved inwards and it houses the rich, so it seems to just be aesthetics.

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4 points

Are we sure they built it like that 1500 years ago? Churches can suck down in the span of only a few hundred years.

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3 points

Wikipedia says it was built around the 5th century

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1 point

The whole thing is basically a wall-clad hill. heaping one stone onto another is something they managed even thousands of years ago. And the climate (it is an oasis in the desert) is dry enought to keep it from eroding.

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3 points

Well clearly it’s because the castle defenders of that era were quite sophisticated, but simply don’t dance they just pull up their pants and do the rockaway.

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2 points

Harder to get on the wall would be my guess

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3 points

Seems to me it’d be a lot easier to scale this incline than a vertical wall

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It’s gregnant

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Mildly Interesting

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