The Servian wall was a little over thirty feet tall (ten meters)... making a dirt ramp three stories high and expecting it to be stable enough... it just doesn't seem (to me) to be a viable option...
At last, a reply!
Yep, I had to research that myself. The article said that in places it was as high as 32 feet.
When I was in the Infantry, we had a worthless, dinky, little toy shovel called an 'entrenching tool'. With this, I dug a 6X3X5 foxhole. I also cut down a small sapling and broke it into small pieces to support the sandbags for the fighting positions overhead cover. After I had the sandbags positioned I covered the whole thing with sod cut from a nearby patch of grass as well as some evergreen shrubs. This took considerably less than 8 hours.
I think that a modern, pizza eating, car driving, Internet browsing man is not going to out work a man who was accustomed to manual labor over his entire life. So if I could move 90 cubic feet of dirt (plus all the other stuff), in less than 8 hours..... Lets just call it a very conservative 100 cubic feet a day and leave it at that.
Not knowing what the Romans are going to have in the way of long range missile weapons with which to harass the workers, lets say that we start the ramp 500 feet or so from the wall.
Lets assume a ramp of 50 foot height, and 500 feet length, and with sides that slope down at a sharp 45% angle. Lets say we want this ramp to be 30 feet wide at the top. So allowing for some variations, we get ~ 50X30X30=45,000 cubic feet for one such ramp. Add in the sloping sides and make it 90,000 cubic feet, and then lets just round it up to an even 100,000 cubic feet of dirt needed for this one ramp.
So, one man would need 1,000 days to be able to move this much dirt, and 1,00 men would need one day. This ignores tamping, harassing fire, counter-attacks, and stony ground that would have to have the dirt transported to the ramp from where it was being dug. I'm to lazy and tired to try and figure out any more detailed things I may have overlooked right now, and will save that for tomorrow.
On the other hand, the fact that this was not attempted in historic times suggests that either they didn't think of it, they didn't have the tools, or there was some good (and forgotten) reason that they couldn't have built a few dozen of these ramps over the course of a spring-summer in the first place.
Any thoughts?
P.S.
I know I am kinda rambling, but I just started a new semester and the shift to 6:00 AM start from a 3:00 PM start for the last 4 months is kicking my behind, but good. No pun intended.
