>Some Maya cities were established hundreds of years before the founding of Rome, and they included significantly larger architecture that still stands.
The Pantheon is qualitatively different than the massive pyramids the Maya built.
Every time I hear an argument "The Egyptian pyramids are still standing to this day", I'm taken aback. Like, what can a pyramid even crumble into, a pile of stones? It already is a pile of stones! Literally!
Some of the earlier pyramids did crumble. They made mistakes and learned from them and innovated over time. The pyramids aren't still standing (just) because of the materials, there's real structural engineering at work.
And later pyramids. As a matter of economy, many were constructed from mudbrick and only encased in true stone. Over time, particularly after the casing stones were removed for other projects, they collapsed into the rubble piles referred to as ruined pyramids.
It's a pile of rocks in the same way an apartment building is a pile of concrete blocks. It is a building. It could crumble in on itself. The interior rooms could be destroyed.
It's a tomb. The Pharoah was buried in the very middle of it. There's an ascending gallery [1] and a burial chamber, along with access shafts. The burial chamber [2] is a large structure in the approximate middle. [3]
It hasn't settled or shifted enough to deviate or crush this significantly. But such shifting was a recurring problem in early Pyramids though. The foundation work must have been an incredible undertaking.
> [The King's Chamber] is faced entirely with granite and measures 20 cubits (10.5 m; 34.4 ft) east-west by 10 cubits (5.2 m; 17.2 ft) north-south. Its flat ceiling is about 11 cubits and 5 digits (5.8 m;19.0 ft) above the floor, formed by nine slabs of stone weighing in total about 400 tons. All the roof beams show cracks due to the chamber having settled 2.5–5 cm (0.98–1.97 in).
One day it'll give way and it'll just be a pile of stones. But for now it is still an engineered structure working as designed.
Erosion, water damage, freeze-thaw cycles, foundation settlement (these are literally mountains of stone built on sand), vandalism and other intentional damage, floodplain evolution.
That last is particularly noteworthy as the Nile famously floods on an annual basis, and that itself is the basis for Egyptian civilisation as those floods created what is still one of the most fantastically productive breadbaskets of the world. Ancient Rome relied on Egypt for grain, and even today demographics data and more vividly night-time satellite light-pollution imagery reveal the Nile as a highly-populated ribbon within a sea of darkness and desolation.
The pyramids have withstood multiple risks for many thousands of years. Despite their simple and rugged overall architecture, that remains impressive.
I think it was Teller who said the secret to a good magic trick was to put in so much effort that no reasonable person would assume that’s what you’d done.
If you wanted to join a bunch of stones so well that there were no seams, using manual labor, would you pick shapes like these to confuse the hell out of future humans who would wonder how you did it with manual labor ?
Humans have been artists and show offs as long as we’ve been human. I don’t know if the craftsman who cut that thought people a millennium later would still be impressed by it, but I’m sure they’d be happy as hell that we are.
The Pantheon is qualitatively different than the massive pyramids the Maya built.