The arch is not a Roman invention. The Babylonians built arches. The Egyptians built arches. The Etruscans used the arch centuries before Rome became a significant power. What Rome did with the arch was different in kind from what any previous civilization had achieved: it deployed the arch at a scale and consistency that transformed the built environment of three continents, in forms — the vault, the barrel vault, the groin vault, the dome — that enabled the massive public spaces that define Roman architecture, and it left behind enough surviving examples that the arch became synonymous with Rome in the European architectural imagination.