Historians have a lot to say on whether border walls — a very old idea — are effective. In 2000 BC, Sumeria, part of the Mesopotamian empire in present-day Iraq and Kuwait, built the wall of Mardu. It has crumbled in ruins for centuries. Most famously, beginning in the seventh century BC, the Chinese started to build the Great Wall of China, which eventually became more than 13,170 miles. “The Great Wall of China today is a nagging drain on the Chinese treasury; it crumbles relentlessly,” wrote historian Pamela Kyle Crossley in Foreign Policy. It is very expensive to maintain. A significant span collapsed after heavy rains in 2018.
The Great Wall was a lot less secure after Chinese alchemists invented gunpowder in 850 A.D. Designed to keep steppe nomads from invading China, the Great Wall was not successful in achieving that goal. “Gunpowder may have played a role in blowing holes in this wall, for the Chinese could not monopolize the terrible new weapon, and their nomadic enemies to the north soon learned to use it against them,” wrote Lynda Shaffer in “China, Technology and Change”, World History Bulletin, Fall/Winter 1986/87; Asia for Educators, Columbia University afe.easia.columbia.edu. “The Song dynasty ultimately fell to the Mongols, the most formidable force ever to emerge from the Eurasian steppe,” she wrote, concluding that “gunpowder may have had a profound effect on China—exposing a united empire to a foreign invasion amid terrible devastation.”
By Jamesflomonosoff at English Wikipedia; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 08:49, 4 May 2010 (UTC) – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain, Link
The Romans built Hadrian’s Wall between England and Scotland “about 120 years after the birth of Christ to protect the Roman province of Britain from the heathens who lived in what is now Scotland — people the Romans referred to as ‘barbarians,’ ” CNN noted, in a survey of the world’s most famous walls.
Several tunnels along the US-Mexican border, used to smuggle drugs, have been detected, MSNBC reported.
Six historians explained to Rolling Stone why Trump’s border wall won’t work. Determined people tend to go around or under walls, and they rarely achieve their intended purpose, they said.
Michael Dear, an emeritus professor in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, published Why Walls Won’t Work: Repairing the US- Mexico Divide in 2015. He asserted in a Politico article that the world is full of walls that don’t work. “For centuries, walls have not worked, and ultimately, they always come down,” he concluded.
In 2017, before Trump took office, the US already had 700 miles of fence along its Southern border. The remaining 1,200 miles were “either open, nearly impossible to actually build on or impassable,” CNN reported. At the same time, the number of unauthorized Mexican migrants diminished.
History Behind the Great Wall of China
Ted-Ed: “The Great Wall of China is a 13,000-mile dragon of earth and stone that winds its way through the countryside of China. As it turns out, the wall’s history is almost as long and serpentine as its structure. Megan Campisi and Pen-Pen Chen detail the building and subsequent decay of this massive, impressive wall. Lesson by Megan Campisi and Pen-Pen Chen, animation by Steff Lee. View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/what-makes-… “