The wall went from one sea to the other—from a broad river mouth in the east to a deep, narrow inlet in the west. Nothing quite like it, other than pipelines and aqueducts of similar length, had been seen in recorded history. It was built by soldiers. Working their way from east to west, they mostly finished in four years, with additions over the next two. But, once built, the wall was fully manned by its makers for as little as a decade. Afterward, it cycled through abandonment and reoccupation—a landmark whose significance shifted continually over the three centuries of slow turmoil that followed, until the successors to its builders eventually withdrew altogether from that land. The wall’s original purpose is subject to debate. Military historians suggest that the wall wasn’t especially well-calibrated—to either the contours of its place or the tactics of its time—as a fortification. Its relentless regularity suggested something conceived and imposed from afar. Its nominal builder was known as a patron and connoisseur of architecture. Some theorize that, thanks to a pale plastered surface, the wall would have shone brilliantly in the sun—and that this display was its purpose as much as any other.
That nominal builder was Publius Aelius Hadrianus Augustus, a Roman emperor. The remains of Hadrian’s Wall, which was completed around the year 128 C.E., still span Scotland between the North Sea and the Irish Sea. All this time later, some distant Anglo-American memory of it may help to explain the political power behind the idea of a wall—even as theories suggest that this wall’s purpose may have been very different, perhaps directly opposite, from that of the wall evoked by our President-elect.
During Donald Trump’s candidacy, his earliest—and, literally and figuratively, most concrete—policy proposal was a wall along the two-thousand-mile border between the United States and Mexico. Some six hundred miles of that border is currently marked by man-made barriers, mostly chain-link steel fencing. As rhetoric, Trump’s proposed wall made his background in real-estate development appear to apply to governance—framing the complex public-policy issue of immigration as a matter of contracting and construction management. Trump described his wall’s particulars in atypically granular detail at an August, 2015, rally in New Hampshire. “I’m a great builder,” he said. “What I do best in life, I build. Your infrastructure is crumbling. Isn’t it nice to have a builder? A real builder. So you take precast plank. It comes thirty feet long, forty feet long, fifty feet long. You see the highways where they can span fifty, sixty feet, even longer than that, right? And you do a beautiful, nice precast plank with beautiful everything. Just perfect.” A thirty-foot-high wall, in precast, post-tensioned concrete panels of the kind Trump specified, has been calculated to require around three times the amount of concrete in the Hoover Dam, plus some five billion pounds of steel reinforcement. At various points during his campaign, Trump announced another ten or fifteen feet added to his wall’s height, although in a Republican debate in October of last year he conceded that, thanks to natural barriers like the Rio Grande, its length could maybe be shortened to a thousand miles.
Why, right now, is such a wall so compelling a vision? There are long recollections of other walls in our popular imagination and our collective memory. There are the walls around the Garden of Eden and, brought down by the blasts of trumpets, around the city of Jericho. There is the defensive wall legendarily built across Syria, or across the Caucasus, by Alexander the Great and his architect Dinocrates. There is the wall that, in the Koran, the traveller Dhu’l-Qarneyn is divinely inspired to build, to contain Yajuj and Majuj, or Gog and Magog, those figures or forces of disorder and disbelief. Traditionally, their eventual breaching of that wall precedes the end of days.
There is, of course, the Great Wall of China, which, at thirty feet wide and four thousand miles long, including its many bends and spurs, makes Hadrian’s work a relative miniature. China’s wall dates in its current stone-and-brick form to the thirteenth through the sixteenth century, when it was raised along the lines of earlier rammed-earth berms dating as far back as the fourth century B.C.E. Travellers’ tales reached the West by the seventeenth century. “And then they say, You can’t build a wall! It’s too big, it doesn’t work,” Trump said, at that same New Hampshire rally. “Well, three thousand years ago—right? The Great Wall of China was built. We would like to have that wall. That wall, nobody gets through. That I can tell you. And that’s thirteen thousand miles, right? And that was done between—it did take them five hundred years, in all fairness. A pretty long time. They don’t stop. We need tough people to negotiate with the Chinese. They don’t stop. But the Great Wall of China was built.” Over the centuries, people like the Manchus and Mongolians, against whom it was built, found ways through and around.
There is the Berlin Wall, which, from 1961 to 1989, stretched for some thirty miles through the heart of that city, making acutely visible the notional Iron Curtain, that Cold War dividing line of some four thousand miles between East and West. That wall began quietly, on an April Sunday morning in 1961, with barbed wire unrolled through unsuspecting streets by East German forces. By 1975, the iconic version had been completed. Its structure closely resembles Trump’s proposed design—featuring precast reinforced concrete panels, four feet wide by twelve feet high, topped by a cast-concrete pipe rendered slippery smooth to prevent climbing. By 1962, a hundred-yard-deep “death strip” had been cleared out behind the wall in East German territory, with fine, smoothly raked gravel underfoot to make footprints visible and running difficult. Sporadically but memorably, in chilling capers of tunnels and balloons and secret compartments, Easterners found ways across. Eight months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the former no-man’s land at Potsdamer Platz, a six-hundred-foot-long, eighty-foot-tall wall of polystyrene bricks was built up and torn down during a performance by Roger Waters of “The Wall”, his band Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera.
The most towering wall in American popular culture, as of this election year, was the famous wall of ice in the HBO television series “Game of Thrones,” and in the author George R. R. Martin’s book series “A Song of Ice and Fire,” on which the television series is based . In the fantasy world of those tales, this vast wall stretches east to west across the north of the continent of Westeros—notionally guarding against would-be revenant barbarians, zombies, and other monstrous outlanders. “The Wall predates anything else,” Martin told Rolling Stone in 2014:
With an estimated sixty million volumes sold and as many as nine million Americans at a time watching episodes of “Game of Thrones,” that wall of ice—and those fantastical dark forces beyond—must have done something to prepare voters’ imaginations, this year, for another wall. But the historical Hadrian’s Wall was likely something quite different from its icy fictional counterpart. There may have been no lonely legionary accustomed to standing on it and looking fearfully north—indeed, no parapet, no walkway along the top, and no crenelations, much of which are archeological conjectures. The westernmost parts of Hadrian’s Wall were originally made of earth rammed into a berm and covered in turf, although that portion and the rest of the wall’s eighty-mile length were eventually finished in rough stone blocks (opportunistically quarried from as close as fifty yards away), raised to a uniform fifteen-foot height and widened to a thickness of six to ten feet, and—strange at first glance—outfitted with an abundance of regularly spaced gates, eighty or more along the wall’s length.
The porosity of all those gates prompts the question of what, to the builders of Hadrian’s Wall, constituted a border. A Roman account, written three centuries after Hadrian, reported that “he went to Britain, where he put many things to rights and was the first to build a wall, eighty miles long, to divide the Romans from the barbarians.” But scholarship suggests that, for its builders, Hadrian’s Wall represented less the end of the world (much less the end of Roman dominion) than a line, within the province of Britannia, between military and civilian jurisdiction—a distinction possibly far more important than Roman-versus-barbarian, ever since an army led by an ambitious Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River into the officially demilitarized capital. A well-travelled road ran behind Hadrian’s Wall, intersecting north-south routes through the gates. Some forts along the wall got their fresh water from aqueducts fed from the north; a hundred miles north, the Romans would build a forty-mile-long earth-and-wood palisade and other tactical and ceremonial structures.
In Roman Britain, political and social identity appears to have been a paradox of what we might today call imperialism combined with multiculturalism, syncretism, and pluralism: less the either/or of nationality and ethnicity, as we tend to construct those categories today, than a matter of degree, in which all the world was in theory always already Roman—just to varying extents of de-facto enforcement. As the state religion of that time robustly incorporated and strangely tolerated local deities, so did state power resolve into overlapping arrangements, direct and indirect, ceremonial and actual, between various clients, enforcers, frenemies, puppets, and custodians along a deep margin. The edges of empire under Hadrian were perhaps less like America’s twenty-first-century southern border than its nineteenth-century Western frontier. Within this kind of landscape, Hadrian’s Wall may have been less a limit than a centerline—symbolizing, catalyzing, and organizing movement and settlement in its shadow—in which all those gates were there not so much to block traffic as to order and promote it. In the imaginary geography of Westeros, the closest equivalent structure to Hadrian’s Wall might not be the frozen Wall of the Night’s Watch but the Twins, a fortified bridge across a significant river that regulates commerce between north and south—not so much a scar in the landscape as a stitch binding it together.
Trump himself has already built a wall in Scotland. A fifteen-foot-tall turf-covered earthwork berm, it happens to be identical in height and construction to the original westernmost portion of Hadrian’s Wall. It runs, along with fencing and landscaping, along the border of a Trump Organization golf course near Aberdeen, in northeast Scotland. It particularly obscures the rural homes of neighboring locals who opted not to sell their property to the development, blocking their former views of dunes and sea. For the cost of earthworks along their shared property line, the golf course sent one homeowner a bill, which the Caledonian isn’t paying. “You watch,” he told the Times_._ “Mexico won’t pay either.”
