Duke Leto

See other thread and let's keep it there for both our sanities' sakes.

DCHindley

Hmmm,

The way I figured it:

Jerusalem @ passover	As Stated	50%	10%	FT Pop.	100%	50%	10%	1
								1 = min, 2 = max
Lambs	256,500	128,250	25,650
persons per lamb	10
Participants	2,565,000	1,282,500	256,500	36,800	70	35	7	= magnitude of population increase for festival
all the rest (estim)	1.5
Total Present	3,847,500	1,923,750	384,750	36,800	105	52	10	= magnitude of population increase for festival
Max pop density	min	max	area	min	max
Hectare	400	500
Acre	160	200	230	36,800	46,000
Dunam	40	50

and

Jerusalem @ passover	As Stated	50%	10%	FT Pop.	100%	50%	10%	2
								1 = min, 2 = max
Lambs	256,500	128,250	25,650
persons per lamb	10
Participants	2,565,000	1,282,500	256,500	46,000	56	28	6	= magnitude of population increase for festival
all the rest (estim)	1.5
Total Present	3,847,500	1,923,750	384,750	46,000	84	42	8	= magnitude of population increase for festival
Max pop density	min	max	area	min	max
Hectare	400	500
Acre	160	200	230	36,800	46,000
Dunam	40	50

If one supposed Josephus exaggerated the attendance by a factor of 10, the population at the fastival would have been 384,750 inclusive of women & children. Based on the minimum year-round population of 160/acre the population during the fastival increased by a factor of 10. If you assume the year-round population was 200/acre, the increase during the festival was a factor of 8. This assumes the area of the city was 230 acres in that period.

Perhaps you could provide some specifics for why this is not reasonable, seeing that Sander's estimate is very close to the one I used.

DCH

Iskander

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/..._of_Rome*.html

Duke Leto

See Eleazer thread.

Duke Leto

Fair enough, but Rome was much MUCH larger than Jerusalem and had two things going for it that Jerusalem does not. The Tiber and Ostia. Jerusalem doesn't have an unlimited supply of drinking water and it has to bring in grain overland.

Duke Leto

While we're at it, Hong Kong Island is one of the world's most densely populated areas. It has a population of 1.3 Million and a area of 31 square miles for a population density of ~42,500 per square mile or 66 per acre.

Manhattan is 1.6 million on 23 square miles, a population density of 69,500 per square mile or 109 per acre.

Shanghai and Tokyo have larger populations but much more area, so there is something like one tenth the population density.

That is with modern building techniques and sanitation.

You are assuming 160-200 permanent residents of second temple Jerusalem per acre on what basis?

Jerusalem didn't have the materials to build multi-story insula tenements like in Rome, there were simply not enough trees.

An acre is 43,560 square feet. If we're extremely generous and assume that every acre in Jerusalem was given over to a three story insula with a footprint of one acre, and pretend that walls take up no space, you have 130,680 square feet of living space for your 200 people, which is 653 square feet per person to live in.

That looks reasonable, a family of 4 would have 2,500 square feet of living space, which is about twice the size of my rather comfortable suburban apartment... but not all acreage can be given over to living space. Even ignoring walls, you have a large amount of streets, businesses, warehouses, stables, taverns and inns, public buildings, and the oversized homes of wealthy Sadducees and the like. Once you account for that, I'd say space per person dwindles to 100-200 square feet per person, which is about twice the size of my bathroom.

That's a breeding pit for disease.

Sorry but given the limited building height and the large amount of space given over to infrastructure, commercial uses or luxury housing, and the limits of sanitation, I don't think more than 15-20 per acre is reasonable.

If nothing else, your 200 people on an acre are going to put out a ton of shit per week, and that will fill up the outhouses very VERY fast.

That puts the 230 acres of old Jerusalem to a population of 5000 max within the walls. I'll grant that ten times that number or so could reside outside the walls.

Iskander

Tacitus, Histories 5:13 say that
Tacitus’ is obviously a wild guess; in part because many people would have swelled the resident population of peacetime Jerusalem and the magnitude of this influx into the city cannot be estimated within a narrow band.


The influx of population into Jerusalem during the festival would also increase the resident population by a significant number.

Tacitus exaggeration is helpful as a guide in the sense that he seems to have found nothing particularly odd with such a large population of 600000, which suggests that the size of the population of Jerusalem appeared to have been routinely estimated to be about 400000 during festivals.

outhouse

and lets not forget Josephas who places the population at this event in the millions.

while historians all go for the more conservative number

outhouse

they had plenty of water.

do you know what Pilate did and who he stole from regarding water??

outhouse

um you do know romans had a sewer system