 okay hey this is the first video about Roman Spain we're gonna check out the theater in Merida in Spain oh wait no no no no in Imperio Romano that's the doom Augusta emerita okay enough being silly but yeah the Roman Tom was called Augusta emerita and it was founded in the first century BCE Augustus needed a place to set up his retired soldiers so this was it and they built the theater shortly after they started the town in about 15 BCE give or take a year or two and as you can see it's a pretty impressive structure but for the longest time it looked like this as you can see it was covered up completely it was excavated in about 1910 so it looked like this until about 1910 and by 1933 it was used again for its original purpose and in 1993 it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and this is the exterior back as you can see some of it's pretty well preserved and some of it's come off probably because that's where the ground level used to be and here's another view and what you can see is that there's two layers here so we have the outside like cladding stones and they're pretty big I'd say they're bigger than cinder blocks and on the inside it has this kind of rubbly looking thing but it's called opus chymenticum opus chymenticum sorry opus chymenticum Roman concrete and if you look real close you can see that it was put in one row of cladding stones at a time because opus chymenticum or Roman concrete didn't get poured in like a slurry the way that we do it where it's a real loose gravelly almost liquid theirs was pretty dry and it would be packed in by hand as opposed to poured anyway then you had in and you've got the skina the backdrop to the stage it could be decorated but usually it was set pretty well the way it was he had the middle of the stage and then he had the left and right of the stage I forget one goes to town and one goes to port and traditional Roman comedy I think anyway that's that and you can see it's made of this the columns are made of this nice blue marble Corinthian order columns really typical of a Roman theater and the acoustics are pretty good you can hear what people are saying down on the stage even though you're pretty far up into the stands it's pretty cool anyway the main seating area was called the Kauea and the division between the Kauea and the stage was the prosciium as you can see if you look at it closely it's raised up I'd say about meter meter and a half maybe four or five American feet and in front of that at a lower area below all the seats is the orchestra where people would dance it wasn't a place to put musicians it was a place to dance that's why it's called an orchestra it has to do with the Greek word which I don't remember at the moment anyway moving on getting to your seat so that little blue arrow is pointing out the entrance and you saw the entrance in the outside pictures but the entrance is called a woman torium vomitorium no didn't have anything to do with vomiting it had to do with getting in and out of theaters and after theaters and the vomitorium led directly to the prikinctio which I've highlighted here in pink because it serves a major division in the theater dividing off the lower seats from the upper seats and the upper seats aren't just divided into one bank of seating it's actually two banks of seating the top is summa summa kahwea and that would be reserved for children and slaves and women because Roman was a socially stratified and segregated society and then in the middle we have the media and in the bottom we have the ima kahwea so the summa had five rows and the media had five rows and the ima had 22 rows theater seated about six thousand or so if memory serves and I'd say well two-thirds of the seats maybe were reserved for citizens high-ranking people in town the ima ima kahwea anyway you'd get to your seat because you'd have to know where to sit and the first row would be called the prima kahwea then the secunda kahwea then the tertia kahwea working our way all the way up to the top of the summa kahwea at ultima kahwea so just like just like a modern theater or sporting stadium you've got rows and then you also have sections and the Romans called it cuneus or wedge so you'd know where to sit there anyway that's the Roman theater I hope you enjoyed it I want to make a couple more about merida probably do a short one about the amphitheater I might combine that with the circus maximus there I might do those two separate videos and then I want to talk a little bit about Roman housing and maybe I'll do a do an overview video of the whole town of merida but today it just struck me to do the theater