Uploaded March 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Probably everyone is familiar to some degree with the famous Great Wall of China. There are, however, other "Great Walls", of varying length and duration of use. This short video will briefly explore a few, but by no means all, of them.
Walls and fortifications have always been a staple of military history and its adjacent fields--after all, it would be rather difficult to talk about a "military revolution" in Early Modern Europe without taking into consideration the development of defensive and offensive architecture. More recently though, there has been interest in other branches of history, like borderlands history, as to the function of walls in marking off defined cultural spaces.
So, this video will explore several of these other "Great Walls" of history. We start with the Amorite Wall, otherwise known as the Wall of Mardu, constructed in the ancient near east and which unfortunatley no longer survives. From there we move onto a massive series of earthworks in Nigeria known as Sungbo's Eredo, a structure which has elicited fascination since its discovery. Next up are the Bosporan Wall and the Cheolli Jangseong (The Great Wall of Goguryeo), both designed to fend off nomads (the Scythians and Khitan respectively). The Red Snake of Gorgan, built by the Persians to help counter the Huns, and the Long Wall of Quang Ngai, in Vietnam are next, both of which survive only in fragments. The video closes with a Roman defensive structure--the Wall of the Julian Alps--and the Serpent, or Snake (or Dragon) Walls in Ukraine.
MUSIC CREDIT:
Echoes of Time by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1300029
Artist: incompetech.com
Probably everyone is familiar to some degree with the famous Great Wall of China. There are, however, other "Great Walls", of varying length and duration of use. This short video will briefly explore a few, but by no means all, of them.
Walls and fortifications have always been a staple of military history and its adjacent fields--after all, it would be rather difficult to talk about a "military revolution" in Early Modern Europe without taking into consideration the development of defensive and offensive architecture. More recently though, there has been interest in other branches of history, like borderlands history, as to the function of walls in marking off defined cultural spaces.
So, this video will explore several of these other "Great Walls" of history. We start with the Amorite Wall, otherwise known as the Wall of Mardu, constructed in the ancient near east and which unfortunatley no longer survives. From there we move onto a massive series of earthworks in Nigeria known as Sungbo's Eredo, a structure which has elicited fascination since its discovery. Next up are the Bosporan Wall and the Cheolli Jangseong (The Great Wall of Goguryeo), both designed to fend off nomads (the Scythians and Khitan respectively). The Red Snake of Gorgan, built by the Persians to help counter the Huns, and the Long Wall of Quang Ngai, in Vietnam are next, both of which survive only in fragments. The video closes with a Roman defensive structure--the Wall of the Julian Alps--and the Serpent, or Snake (or Dragon) Walls in Ukraine.
MUSIC CREDIT:
Echoes of Time by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1300029
Artist: incompetech.com
