Engineering the Ancient World E-Book

Dick Parry

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 445

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

How high were the walls of Jericho? Where did Nebuchanezzar get hold of all the bitumen he needed for the millions of bricks required to build Babylon? Was the ancient Suez canal really 200km long, and did 120,000 Egyptians die in the course of its construction? The ancient historian Herodotus had answers to all these questions and filled many pages of his famous histories with descriptions of the wonders and marvels that he saw on his extensive travels through Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia and Persia, from the hanging gardens of Babylon to the temple of Diana at Ephesus. In Engineering the Ancient World, engineering expert Dick Parry goes back over Herodotus's footsteps and compares his accounts of the extraordinary achievements of ancient engineers, builders and designers with what archaeologists and historians have since discovered. In a fascinating interplay between ancient writer and modern scientist, we learn that though we often have to take Herodotus with a pinch of salt, he was not far short of the truth. With Dick Parry to guide us through the places that Herodotus visited we can appreciate the extraordinary technological genius which brought about these impressive monuments.

Leseprobe

ENGINEERING

THE

ANCIENT

WORLD

ENGINEERING

THE

ANCIENT

WORLD

DICK PARRY

First published in the United Kingdom in 2005 by Sutton PublishingLimited

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Dick Parry, 2005, 2013

The right of Dick Parry to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9550 7

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

1.  CONTROLLING AND CONSUMING THE WATERS

2.  PLYING THE WATERS

3.  CROSSING THE WATERS

4.  TRAVERSING THE LAND

5.  KEEPING OUT THE ENEMY

6.  ZIGGURATS, RITUAL MOUNDS AND AN ANCIENT ENVIRONMENTAL ICON

7.  BUILDINGS FOR THE GODS

8.  BUILDINGS FOR KINGS AND SUBJECTS

9.  ENTOMBING THE DEAD

POSTSCRIPT: A NOTE ON BUILDING MATERIALS, STRUCTURAL FORMS AND CLASSICAL COLUMN ORDERS

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

SOURCES OF QUOTED PASSAGES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The full-scale rolling tests to explore this possible method for transporting and raising Pyramid stones were financed and carried out in Japan by the Obayashi Corporation in 1996, while those relating to the Stonehenge bluestones were carried out in 1998 on the mountainside of Carne Meini, immediately below the bluestone outcrop, as part of the TV programme Stonehenge: Secrets of the Stones produced by Yorkshire Television. The many extracts from Herodotus, The Histories, are reproduced with the kind permission of Penguin Books Limited, and I am grateful, too, to Cambridge University Press for permission to include extracts from Science and Civilisation in China by Joseph Needham, Lu Gwei-Djen and Ling Wang. I am much indebted to my good friend Demetrios Coumoulos for assisting me in obtaining information on the Eupalinos tunnel. My thanks also to Christopher Feeney, Hilary Walford, Jane Entrican, Victoria Carvey and other staff members at Sutton Publishing who have contributed to making the book a reality.

PREFACE

This book owes its existence largely to a man who lived nearly 2,500 years ago. When gathering material for my book Engineering the Pyramids I found that the best description of the construction of the Great Pyramid, or anyway the one that convinced me the most, was that by the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC. But, perhaps more importantly, I came to realise that our understanding of a number of the engineering achievements of our ancient forebears owes much to the writings of Herodotus. Most of those writing about Herodotus, whether laudatory in their comments or otherwise, have been classicists, and, not surprisingly, the engineering achievements of the time have not been their primary consideration. We are fortunate that Herodotus was a keen observer, had a curious mind, and had the ability to glean information from the priests and other informed people he met or sought out during his extensive travels. Cicero saw him as the ‘Father of History’ and, as he might well be the most quoted (and misquoted) author in any field, this seems to be a reasonable claim; but there have been, and still are, those who view him in a different light. He was certainly a teller of tall tales, but he invariably makes it clear that he is simply repeating something told to him: a modern historian would be expected to judge such bits of information critically and weed them out, or suffer the opprobrium of his peers; but Herodotus, free of precedent and peers, leaves the reader to make what he or she will of them.

The world Herodotus knew, or knew about, comprised the countries fringing the Mediterranean, and extending eastward at least as far as the Persian Gulf. He also had some acquaintance with areas fringing the Black Sea. His knowledge of the geography and history of these areas came from his own observations and discussions with local people, other travellers and learned persons, such as priests, during his travels and to a limited extent from existing texts, such as the writings of Hecateus. It is clear from his many references to ancient works that he recognised that the world he knew owed much to the engineers who had devised the means to cross rivers, traverse the land, irrigate the crops, supply water for human construction, and build the great temples and tombs. It was these engineers, and not the great kings or their armies, who established the very foundations of civilisation. An appreciation of the work of these ancient engineers must not be limited to the works described or mentioned by Herodotus; but it is he who provides us with an excellent starting point from which we can look back to the great accomplishments preceding his time (many of which still existed in, or influenced, the world he knew), and forward to the great accomplishments that came after his time, which, in some instances, owed much to the knowledge accumulated before and during his time.

During his lifetime much of the world known to Herodotus, outside Greece itself, was under Persian control. But it was a world that over the previous three millennia had experienced a kaleidoscope of changing civilisations, each benefiting from the knowledge and technological expertise of its predecessors and sometimes its neighbours; each, in turn, advertently or inadvertently passing knowledge to later successors. Born in Halicarnassus around 480 BC, at a time when it was under Persian control, Herodotus moved to the island of Samos as a young man, perhaps frustrated by the heavy hand of authority in his home town. His interests during his lifetime ranged far and wide, and, in addition to his account of the construction of the Great Pyramid, he has given us descriptions of engineering works as diverse as the ancient Suez Canal, Lake Moeris and its water supply from the Nile, the tunnel of Eupalinos on Samos, the pontoon bridges of Darius and Xerxes constructed to cross the Bosphorus and Hellespont respectively, diversion of the Euphrates at Babylon, the great walls, moat and ziggurat of Babylon, and the great sepulchral mound of Alyattes. One of his descriptions, of a labyrinth close to Lake Moeris, has been the subject of speculation and discussion in modern times. Despite his claim that it surpassed the pyramids themselves, there is no evidence that such a remarkable building existed, although the site can be identified and some sort of structure certainly occupied it. Diodorus also gives a description of the labyrinth, which he believed to be a common tomb for twelve leaders who ruled simultaneously as kings in Egypt.

It was several hundred years after Herodotus that other writers such as Diodorus Siculus (c. 80 BC–20 BC) and Strabo (c. 64 BC–ad 25) gave similar prominence to engineering achievements in their writings. It was also in the first century BC that Vitruvius produced his Ten Books of Architecture, essential reading not only for Roman engineers and architects, but also for Renaissance luminaries such as Alberti, Bramante, Michelangelo and Palladio. Vitruvius lists the three essentials of good building as durability, convenience (i.e. function) and beauty, but also stresses the importance of economy, which he denotes as the proper management of materials and of site, as well as a thrifty balancing of cost and common sense in the construction of works. In the first century ad, Frontinus, Roman Consul, onetime Governor of Britain and later to occupy the high office of Manager of Aqueducts at Rome, produced his treatise on the Aqueducts of Rome.

The remarkable civil engineering achievements of the ancient world were not, of course, confined to the world known to Herodotus. The great megalithic structures of Malta and Western Europe pre-dated the Greek historian by 2,000 years and more. Great irrigation schemes and other works were instigated in China and Sri Lanka. Herodotus knew of a country far to the east inhabited by strange animals and humans with strange habits, but certainly did not know of the advanced Harappan civilisation situated along the Indus River, which pre-dated him by 1,500 years.

In ancient China two of the greatest achievements a young man could aspire to were to be able to write, preferably poetry, and to be able to construct a canal. As a result this produced some outstanding writers and some of the most outstanding hydraulic engineers in the ancient world. Unfortunately, literary and technical abilities seldom occurred in combination in single individuals, as noted by Needham:

What is true of living humanists in the West is also true of some of the Chinese scholars of long ago whose writings are often our only means of access to the techniques of past ages. The artisans and technicians knew very well what they were doing, but they were liable to be illiterate, or at least inarticulate. The bureaucratic scholars, on the other hand, were highly articulate but too often despised the rude mechanicals whose activities, for one reason or another, they wrote about from time to time. Thus even the authors whose words are now so precious were often more concerned with their literary style than with the details of the machines and processes that they mentioned. This superior attitude was also not unknown amongst the artists, back-room experts (like the mathematicians) of the officials’ yamens [offices], so that often they were more interested in making a charming picture than in showing the precise details of machinery when they were asked to limn it, and now sometimes it is only by comparing one drawing with another that we can reach certainty about the technical content. At the same time there were many great scholar-officials throughout Chinese history from Châng Heng in the Han to Shen Kua in the Sung and Tai Chen in the Ch’ing who combined a perfect expertise in classical literature with complete mastery of the sciences of their day and the applications of these in artisanal practice.

For all these reasons our knowledge of the development of technology is still in a lamentably backward state, vital though it is for economic history, that broad meadow of flourishing speculation.

One might be excused for wondering if the man who wrote the above, pessimistic, account was the same one who produced the great tomes constituting Science and Civilisation in China, arguably the most authoritative account ever written in the fields of engineering and science history. Fortunately, many of the civil engineering achievements of the ancient Chinese remain substantially intact and in some cases still in use, such as the Anchi Bridge (unmatched in Europe for 1,000 years), the Kuanhsein irrigation project, the Grand Canal and substantial lengths of the Great Wall.

Structures which have remained intact, or substantially so, since ancient times do not necessarily easily yield up their secrets, such as their purposes or methods of construction, in the absence of contemporary written or pictorial evidence. There are no better examples of this than the Egyptian pyramids, which raise innumerable questions. Their purpose may seem obvious, but in how many were the remains of pharaohs actually entombed? Why was the pyramid shape adopted? What was their astronomical significance? Why do they differ so much in detail, for example in the locations of the tomb chambers? How were they built? The last question has attracted many suggested solutions, ranging from the credible through the illogical to the impossible, often disregarding simple principles of mechanics. Similar questions can be posed with respect to the great Neolithic and early Bronze Age stone structures of Western Europe, constructed at much the same time as the pyramids. Sufficient of Stonehenge remains to give a good indication of its completed form, if, in fact, it ever was completed; but what was the significance of its alignment with the solstices? How was this alignment exploited? Why was this site chosen, so far from the sources of the megaliths used in its construction? How were the megaliths, up to 40 tons in weight, transported to the site, then raised to the vertical and topped with lintels? But perhaps the greatest Neolithic puzzle of them all is the purpose behind the construction of Silbury Hill, an explanation for which is attempted in this book.

In considering the title of this book, the reader might well ask what period comprises ‘ancient’. In fact it cannot be simply a chronological delineation: social structures and technological development are other legitimate criteria. The civilisations of South and Central America, and the early Indian settlements in the USA such as at Cahokia, had more in common with early Mediterranean civilisations than they did with their contemporaries in Europe and consequently find a place in this book. Major engineering works and buildings built in the name of, or influenced by, the Christian and Islamic faiths, dating back to the conversion of Constantine in the former case and from the seventh century in the latter case, have not been included in this book and are deserving of their own volume.

1

CONTROLLING AND CONSUMING THE WATERS

Neolithic hunter-gatherers living on the Nile river plains and adjacent areas evolved around 6000 BC into farming communities able to exploit the rich agricultural and pastoral land bordering the river, which was replenished and revitalised each year by the annual inundation. Two distinct groupings emerged: a northern group centred around the modern Cairo–Fayum area (Lower Egypt) and a southern group (Upper Egypt). The pre-dynastic period saw some merging of the two cultures, but also military conflicts, which culminated, around 3100 BC, in a victory by the king of Upper Egypt, Menes (also known as Narmer), who brought about the unification of the two states under a single king or pharaoh. However, clear distinctions between the two groups remained throughout pharaonic times and were recognised in the form of separate administrations and the pharaoh wearing the double crown. This comprised the pharaoh wearing both the high conical hat, or white crown of Upper Egypt, and the flat-topped cap with a tall projection at the back and a long feather curling forward – the red crown of Lower Egypt. The victory of Menes/Narmer and the subsequent unification is depicted on a famous schist palette that shows the king, wearing the white crown, smashing the skull of an adversary. On the other side, wearing the red crown, he is shown in regal marching pose preceded by the standard-bearers of the conquering nomes.

Around 3100 BC Menes established his capital at Memphis, 24km south of modern Cairo, having had the course of the Nile diverted to create a site suitable for a city replete with gardens, temples and palaces. The site was close to where the elongated narrow Nile valley of the Upper, or southern, largely arid region meets the fan-shaped Lower, or northern, productive marshy Delta, through which the river divides into several branches.

In order to ensure the continued unification of the two very different regions of the country, Menes put in hand major construction works, which would have occupied a workforce of many thousands. This was a political decision cementing the concept of unification. Herodotus describes the work as told to him:

The priests told me that it was Min [Menes], the first king of Egypt, who raised the dam which created Memphis. The river used to flow along the base of the sandy hills on the Libyan border, and this monarch, by damning it up at the bend about a hundred furlongs south of Memphis, drained the original channel and diverted it to a new one half-way between the two lines of hills. To this day the elbow which the Nile forms here, where it is forced into its new channel, is most carefully watched by the Persians, who strengthen the dam every year; for should the river burst it, Memphis might be completely overwhelmed. On the land which had been drained by the diversion of the river, King Min built the city which is now called Memphis – it lies in the narrow part of Egypt – and afterwards on the north and west sides of the town excavated a lake, communicating with the river, which itself protects it on the east. In addition to this the priests told me that he built there the large and very remarkable temple of Hephaestus.

It is no coincidence that the early civilisations developed in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The interrelationships and interdependencies between humans, which are the basis of civilisation and urban life, depend, more than any other factor, on the ready availability of water and the ability to control and exploit it. The Euphrates and Tigris (and their tributaries and lesser rivers in Mesopotamia), and the Nile, provided, most of the time at least, a reliable abundance of this commodity: it was simply a matter of controlling and exploiting this largesse.

The rivers that gave could also take away. At its highest levels in June and July, after heavy rains or melting snow at its source in the Turkish mountains, and possibly boosted by high tides in the Persian Gulf, the water level in the Euphrates exceeded by several metres the level of the surrounding land. Any breaching of the banks could lead to widespread and devastating floods, covering the land for months. But much more insidious was the river behaviour that led to the ultimate demise of many of the great city states of the Mesopotamian plains. A great river winding its way through plains such as these removes the highly erodable alluvial deposits on the outside of its bends and deposits them inside bends downstream, or along stretches where the water velocity drops markedly, thus building up its bed. Over a period of time the process of erosion and deposition can lead, inevitably, to changes amounting to tens of kilometres more in the course of the river. Rampaging floodwaters can also cut new channels. Settlements deprived of the river, and depending on it for their very existence, cannot survive. Woolley’s excavations showed the Euphrates to have ‘washed the walls of Ur on the west’. From the river, canals led into the city conveying water-borne traffic, and into the fields, spreading far across the plains, for irrigation. Today the river runs 16km to the east of the ruins and the great plain is a barren desert.

In ancient societies, women, with only a few exceptions such as Boudicca in Britain or Hatshepsut in Egypt, had little influence on administration or religion, or in the conduct of wars. If some of the ancient writers are to be believed, Semiramis of Assyria was also such an exception, although the truth seems to be that she was a semi-fictitious figure based on Sammuramat, an Assyrian queen who acted as regent for a few years until her son Adad-nirari III came of age. She may well have numbered some major achievements during her short regency, but certainly not those attributed to her by Diodorus, or, perhaps more specifically, by Ctesias of Cnidas, whom he often quotes. A Greek by birth, Ctesias served as a physician in the Persian court for seventeen years and attended Artaxerxes on the battlefield. His history of Persia to 397 BC, written in twenty-three books, survives today only in fragments. Diodorus (or Ctesias) claims that the young Semiramis, nurtured by doves as a baby and brought up by the keeper of the royal herds of cattle, ‘far surpassed all the other maidens in beauty’ when she came of age to marry. She married an army officer, but unfortunately for him the king, Ninus, accredited by Diodorus as the founder of Nineveh, became infatuated with her and when her husband refused to give her up, threatened his well-being to the extent that he hanged himself. Ninus then married her. Shortly afterwards he died, whereupon Semiramis erected a huge mound over his tomb, then set about founding the city of Babylon known to the classical writers, putting in hand stupendous building projects.

She decided to install a very large obelisk within the city to serve as a focal point and, for this purpose, according to Diodorus, ‘quarried out a stone from the mountains of Armenia which was 40m long and 7.5m wide and thick; and this she hauled by means of many multitudes of yokes of mules and oxen to the river and there loaded it on a raft, on which she brought it down the stream to Babylonia’. Such a stone would have weighed well over 5,000 tons, many times bigger than any obelisk raised and transported by the Egyptians, and could not have been transported in the manner described by Diodorus. It served, however, as a spur to Layard, a somewhat eccentric Englishman, who discovered in 1845 the ruins of Nineveh with its bas-reliefs and huge sculptures of human-headed winged bulls and lions, weighing about 10 tons, which he wanted to remove from the site and ship to London. Well versed in the writings of Diodorus and the supposed feats of Semiramis, Layard was not to be deterred by instructions from the Museum of London to leave the statues in place, covered with earth. He moved the statues out of their trenches on greased rollers and lowered them onto robust wooden carts with solid wooden wheels, which were specially constructed for the purpose. He then conveyed them to the Tigris River, where they were loaded onto enormous rafts, each consisting of six hundred inflated sheep and goat skins, and taken down river to Basra and shipped to London.

Herodotus’ claims for Semiramis are much more modest than those of Diodorus, referring only to some embankment works to control flooding. He attributes much more major earthworks to a later, entirely legendary, Queen Nitocris, including channel and basin excavations and diversion of the Euphrates to reduce the speed of the current, and thereby creating a devious course to discourage an influx of Medes into Babylon.

There can be little doubt that earthworks – excavations and embankment constructions – were made by the early rulers of Babylon to control flooding of the city and surrounding areas. Unfortunately for the Babylonians, the river, without which the city could not have existed, could also be exploited by their enemies in their assaults on it, the Assyrians in the seventh century BC and the Persians in the sixth century BC taking full advantage of this.

Assyria became an important power in the region around the middle of the fourteenth century BC, although its capital Assur, exploiting its location on the Tigris, had been an important trading post for at least 1,000 years before this, with much of the north–south trade such as copper from Anatolia and tin and textiles from Mesopotamia funnelling through it. Donkey caravans headed eastwards from Assur. Their kings now corresponded on equal terms with the Great Kings of the Hittites and the pharaohs of Egypt, and, while close ties were maintained with the Kassites in Babylon, these sometimes led to military conflicts between the two. Having assumed dominion over all of northern Mesopotamia by 1250 BC, they turned their attentions southwards towards Akkad and Sumer, and in 1250 BC captured Babylon, the king Tukulti-Ninurta recording: ‘I captured Babylon’s king and trod his proud neck as if it were a footstool … thus I became lord of all Sumer and Akkad …’. Their occupation of Babylon lasted only eight years, after which they exercised control over southern Mesopotamia only to the extent required to protect their trading and political interests. Over 300 years passed before they resumed their military conquests, annexing south-eastern Anatolia early in the ninth century BC and overrunning Syria to give them direct access to the Mediterranean.

During his reign Assurnasirpal moved the capital of Assyria to the more central location of Kalhu (modern Nimrud). Tablets found there show the Assyrian-controlled territories to have been divided into provincial units, each with a governor responsible to the king and sometimes a member of the king’s family. In the seventh century BC the Babylonians, now predominantly Chaldeans originating from tribal settlements along the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, drove out Sennacherib’s appointed King of Babylonia, his own son Ashurnadishum, presumably in the belief that they would be able to withstand any assault the Assyrians could launch against them. But they reckoned without the technological and military genius of this great Assyrian king. He sacked the city in 689 BC, laid waste to it and massacred the people. Directing water from the Euphrates through the city, he left it a wilderness, and as an added humiliation he removed the statue of Marduk to Assyria. With this accomplished, he transferred his own capital from Khorsabad (briefly the capital under Sennacherib’s father Sargon II) to Nineveh.

But Babylon was just biding its time. When its retaliation against Assyria came, it was devastating. Forming an alliance with Scythians and Medes, the Babylonians conquered Nineveh in 612 BC and razed it to the ground; unlike Babylon itself, it was never to rise again. With Assyria consigned to oblivion, Babylon entered a new golden age under the Chaldean kings Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadnezzar, the latter ruling forty-three years from 605 BC. The city now achieved its greatest size and splendour. Although captured by the Persian King Cyrus in 539 BC, it remained a great city for a further half a century until Xerxes, in putting down an internal rebellion in 482 BC, reduced it to a provincial town. Nevertheless, sufficient of the old city remained to impress Herodotus when he visited it in the middle of the fifth century BC.

Cyrus exploited the river in his attack on the city in 539 BC. Well aware that they would eventually come under attack from the powerful Persian king, who was seemingly unstoppable in the expansion of his empire, the Babylonians had stocked up with sufficient provisions to last many years. As expected, Cyrus invested the city, but as the siege dragged on he or his commanders realised that it would require a change in tactics in order to defeat the city. According to Herodotus:

Then somebody suggested or he [Cyrus] himself thought up the following plan: he stationed part of his force at the point where the Euphrates flows into the city and another contingent at the opposite end where it flows out, with orders to both to force an entrance along the riverbed as soon as they saw that the water was shallow enough. Then, taking with him all his non-combatant troops, he withdrew to the spot where Nitocris had excavated the lake, and proceeded to repeat the operation which the queen had previously performed; by means of a cutting he diverted the river into the lake (which was then a marsh) and in this way so greatly reduced the depth of water in the actual bed of the river that it became fordable, and the Persian army, which had been left at Babylon for the purpose, entered the river, now only deep enough to reach about the middle of a man’s thigh, and, making their way along it, got into the town.

This stratagem, also described by Xenophon, enabled the troops to enter the city on a night when the citizens were engaged in dancing and revelries associated with religious festivities. Having taken the city in this bloodless way, Cyrus had no reason to sack the city, and life went on very much as before. According to contemporary accounts, admittedly based on Persian sources, the Babylonians welcomed the replacement of the tyrant Nabonidus, son of Nebuchadnezzar, by the Persian king. Cyrus took up residence in the royal palace; but he respected both the religious and political role of the priests and, most importantly, showed proper respect towards the god Marduk. He allowed trade and commerce to go on as before and, wisely, did not impose swingeing taxes on the city, which could have incited rebellion.

Cyrus may well have learnt something about the technicalities of river diversion from Croesus, the Lydian king he had defeated. Before attacking Persia, Croesus had consulted the Oracle at Delphi and was told that if he did so he would destroy a great empire. With this assurance he marched on Persia. In doing so he had to cross the Halys River. According to Herodotus, he traversed an existing bridge, but he also recounts an existing story that, advised by Thales of Miletus, Croesus had the river split into two fordable channels.

In the event, Croesus crossed the river and laid waste to the land, dispossessing innocent Syrians on the other side of their homes and possessions and even their freedom. After a brief battle with the much larger army of Cyrus, he hastily retreated to his capital at Sardis to drum up support from his allies before mounting a further attack on the Persians. Help never came. Cyrus pursued the Lydian army, and after a siege of fourteen days, stormed Sardis and took Croesus prisoner. And so the oracle was fulfilled: Croesus had indeed destroyed a mighty empire, regrettably his own. Cyrus not only spared Croesus, but also befriended him and sought his advice from time to time on political and military matters.

As readily available land for cultivation became scarce in the Greek world, attention turned to the possibility of draining shallow lakes, swamps and marshes to create fertile land. One such area was Lake Copais, a vast reed swamp some 65km north of Athens. The natural outlets, rock fissures and subterranean tunnels often became blocked, particularly by frequent earthquake activity, causing lake levels to rise and flood surrounding fertile land, while the levels of rivers discharging into it also rose and flooded over their banks. Various attempts were made even as early as Helladic times around 1400 BC to overcome this problem, including intercepting incoming water by canal and conducting it to natural outlets.

In 325 BC the Greek engineer Crates made an ambitious attempt to drain the lake, first of all by clearing earlier drainage channels and tunnels, then by driving a tunnel over a mile long. He had the work well in hand when Alexander the Great’s military activities in the area brought it to a halt. The practice adopted by Crates comprised driving the tunnel from the bases of vertical shafts, spaced some 60m apart. This gave many faces on which to work and thereby hastened the driving of the tunnel, but was a method that demanded exacting surveying methods. He also adopted a curving alignment, rather than a straight line, following ground that kept the depths of his vertical shafts to a minimum. The work resumed in modern times, with its eventual completion in 1890. The lakebed is now farmland.

An even more famous drainage tunnel of classical times was driven by the Romans under the direction of freedman Narcissus, secretary to Claudius and the most powerful man in Rome, until Claudius, having disposed of his third wife Messalina, married his politically motivated niece Agrippina, a match of which Narcissus unwisely disapproved. She had him jailed and probably killed, having already murdered Claudius with poisoned mushrooms to ensure the succession of Nero, her son by a previous marriage. Five years after his accession in AD 59, Nero murdered Agrippina to rid himself of her domineering influence.

Claudius commissioned Narcissus to oversee the excavation of a drainage tunnel to reclaim 20,000 hectares of land around Lake Fucino in the Apennines, some 80km east of Rome. It took 30,000 men eleven years to drive the 5.5km-long tunnel through limestone and alluvial strata – difficult even with modern techniques – driving forward the excavation, 2.75m wide and nearly 6m high according to Livy, from working faces at the bottoms of forty vertical shafts, up to 120m deep, supplemented by a number of inclined shafts. Considerable stretches of shafts and tunnel in falling ground had to be temporarily supported with timbers and permanently lined with ashlar masonry. Rock was excavated by chiselling or by chilling heated surfaces with water, causing the rock to crack. Excavated rocks and earth were hauled by windlasses to the surface in copper buckets up the vertical shafts.

Claudius ordered a great naval battle on the lake to celebrate the completion of the tunnel, pitting two fleets of triremes against each other, manned by 19,000 expendable convicts. When the first attempt to drain the lake failed because the tunnel inlet was positioned too high in relation to the lake level, the Emperor ordered the mistake to be corrected and staged a second grand opening with further satisfactory bloodshed. He also ordered a banquet for the great and the good to be set up close to the tunnel outlet, part of which, along with some of the participants, was washed away when the outflow proved to be much greater than expected. This was Narcissus’ final undoing, as, according to Suetonius, he argued violently with Agrippina over the mishap, she accusing him of profiting unduly from the work and he impugning her personality and lifestyle. Pliny, who must certainly have witnessed the work, described it as beyond the power of words to describe, the operations imaginable only by those who saw them. It remained the longest tunnel in the world until the opening of the Mount Cenis railroad tunnel in the European Alps in 1876.

The Romans made sporadic attempts to drain the Pontine Marshes by canalisation, but with only limited success. They achieved greater success with land reclamation works in the Po Valley, undertaken for the purpose of settling discharged soldiers, and with drainage works in the marshes of Ravenna. Ravenna became increasingly important in Roman times and even more so after the fall of Rome when Honarius made it his capital. The Romans did not confine their drainage work to Italy, and it is possible that Car Dyke in England, starting just north of Cambridge and terminating near Lincoln, although primarily for transportation, also served to drain parts of the Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire fens.

Drainage works in the ancient world did not stop at flood control and land reclamation, but also included urban works, some of which showed a high level of technological skill. The remains of an excellent sewerage system can still be seen at the site of Mohenjodaro in Pakistan, one of the twin capital cities of the Harappan civilisation that flourished along the Indus River between 2500 BC and 1500 BC. Excavations have revealed a well-laid-out rectangular grid of unpaved streets, beneath which ran an elaborate system of corbelled drains constructed with kiln-fired bricks. Waste-water matter discharged from private houses and public buildings was conducted through pottery pipes to the under-street drains, which also collected surface water after rains. The drains led the sewage to soak pits situated outside the populated area. Household rubbish was similarly disposed of by being placed into chutes discharging into bins in the street, which the authorities emptied at regular intervals. Most of the houses had their own brick-lined wells to provide water for cooking and washing.

The Minoans, whose civilisation in Crete was contemporary with that along the Indus, also had outstanding hydraulic engineers. Their palace at Knossos had bathrooms, bathtubs and sanitary facilities flushed by a continuous water flow system. The latrines connected to an extensive drainage system through the palace, utilising tapered baked clay or terracotta pipes, which gave a shooting motion that helped to keep the successive lengths clear of sediment.

Many Minoan ideas were passed on to the Greeks, but this did not include sanitation. The streets of most Greek cities were muddy, filthy alleys with no attempt at drainage: refuse and slops were thrown into the streets, a custom that prevailed in European cities until the eighteenth century. The more thoughtful Greek occupant, mindful of the passer-by, would call out exito! before throwing out the slops.

Smaller Roman towns and settlements probably had sanitary conditions little if any better than those practised by the Greeks, but in larger towns the Romans installed efficient drainage and sewerage systems, including under-road drains that can be seen in Pompeii and Herculaneum today. The first drainage system in Rome itself started in the Tarquin period, perhaps 500 BC, with the excavation of an open ditch to drain the valleys between the seven hills into the Tiber. The Forum was drained in this way. Successive generations enlarged and improved this drain, and about 300 BC it was covered with a stone barrel vault, sufficiently large to be navigable by small boats. This drain, the Cloaca Maxima, still carries rainwater off the streets into the Tiber, as it has done for more than 2,000 years.

Although the Cloaca Maxima itself has never carried household wastes, the sewerage system created by the Romans for their capital did cope with this problem. A number of large public latrines connected to this system, using water from the public baths and industrial establishments to flush the appliances. Some of these latrines became so elaborate that archaeologists excavating one in the nineteenth century mistook it for a temple. Most of the insulae, which were similar to our modern blocks of flats, had their own latrines connecting to the sewer system or to cesspools.

Control of water could be exercised in a positive way by harnessing the energy of water flow to provide power. Although there exists no evidence that civilisations pre-dating the classical period in Europe knew about or used waterwheels, it does not necessarily exclude the possibility that they did so. The first reference to a waterwheel appears to be in a poem by Antipater of Thessalonica, in the first century BC, which runs:

Women who toil at the querns, cease now your grinding;

Sleep late though the crowing of cocks announces the dawn.

Your task is now for the nymphs, by command of Demeter,

And leaping down on the top of the wheel, they turn it,

Axle and whirling spokes together revolving and causing

The heavy and hollow Nysrian stones to grind above.

So shall we taste the joys of the golden age

And feast on Demeter’s gifts without ransom of labour

Strabo, writing in 24 BC, refers to a waterwheel at Cabeira in the Pontus that formed part of the property Methracles lost in 65 BC, when he was overthrown by Pompey.

Surprisingly, the Greeks and Romans used waterwheels only for grinding corn, ignoring other possible applications of the power the wheels provided. It must have occurred to their engineers that the power could be usefully employed for mine drainage, fulling cloth, sawing wood and other purposes, but the availability of other labour may have made such uses unnecessary. It might also have been official policy to keep this abundant labour fully occupied. Idle hands allied to fertile brains might have led to activities not conducive, in the minds of the authorities, to good order in society.

The most primitive type of mill comprised a horizontal wheel with six to eight flaps or scoops fixed around its rim and set in a rapidly running stream, or with a stream of water from a chute directed onto the flaps; in the latter case it became a primitive turbine. The vertical shaft passed up through a hole in the lower millstone and turned the upper millstone, and so did not require any gearing. This type of mill, usually known as a ‘Norse Mill’ or ‘Vertical Water Mill’, was common in hilly regions in the Near East. Slow and inefficient, it could grind only small amounts of corn, making it suitable only for single-family or small-community use.

A better arrangement consisted of a waterwheel set vertically on a horizontal axis, driving gearing that not only converted the horizontal rotary motion into rotary motion about a vertical axis, but also allowed the rate of rotation to be greatly increased. Vitruvius gives an excellent description of this type, having already dealt with the raising of water by human treadmill:

Wheels on the principles that have been described above are also constructed in rivers. Around their faces flatboards are fixed, which, on being struck by the current of the river, make the wheel turn as they move, and thus, by raising the water in the boxes and bringing it to the top, they accomplish the necessary work through being turned by the mere impulse of the river, without any treading on the part of the workmen.

Water mills are turned on the same principle. Everything is the same in them, except that a drum with teeth is fixed into one end of the axle. It is set vertically on its edge, and turns in the same plane with the wheel. Next to this larger drum there is a smaller one, also with teeth, but set horizontally, and this is attached (to the millstone). Thus the teeth of the drum, which is fixed to the axle, make the teeth of the horizontal drum move, and cause the mill to turn. A hopper, hanging over this contrivance, supplies the mill with corn, and meal is produced by this same revolution.

The increase in rotation rate through the gearing in Roman mills, commonly about fivefold, provided the fast rotary motion required to grind large quantities of corn. Nevertheless, this type of wheel, the undershot wheel as described by Vitruvius, still had a low efficiency, probably no more than 20 per cent, in addition to which, in deriving its power solely from the velocity of the water striking the underside of the wheel, it suffered from the vagaries of stream flow rate and water level.

Despite the clear description of the water mill given by Vitruvius, they were not in widespread use at the time of his writing in the first century BC and started to find favour only in the fourth century ad, and then apparently only because of an acute shortage of labour. In Rome itself milling activities centred on the Janiculum, using horses and donkeys to drive the mills. In some places, the Roman authorities favoured human-driven mills, exploiting convicts, prisoners of war or simply the unemployed, as a means of absorbing this potentially explosive human energy.

A much more efficient unit, known as the overshot wheel, had scoops or buckets around its circumference driven by a stream of water directed onto the top of the wheel. The energy driving the wheel came from both the velocity of the water and its head or elevation, the weight of water in the descending buckets helping to rotate the wheel. Mills of this type had efficiencies as high as 60–70 per cent and a wheel of typically 2m diameter developed up to 3 horsepower. The drawback with this type of wheel was the need to bring the water in at a high level. This could be accomplished by locating the mill beside a stream tapped at a point some distance upstream and having the water brought to the mill along a chute with a flatter slope and perhaps more direct route than the stream itself. Alternatively, where the topography allowed, the mill could be sited on a hillside and the water brought in by aqueduct to the top of the hill.

Evidence of the use of overshot wheels is fairly sparse, but the remains of such a wheel operating in the Athenian Agora (marketplace, place of assembly) in the fifth century AD have been found. Easily the most impressive find, however, has been the remains of a Roman mill at Barbegal, near Arles in the south of France, built in the fourth century ad. It consisted of sixteen 2.1m-diameter overshot wheels, in pairs, sited on a hillside with a slope of 30º and a total fall of 20m. Water was brought by a 9km-long aqueduct to the site to drive the wheels. Allowing for maintenance and other interruptions, it has been calculated that the mill probably produced, on average, some 4.5 tons of flour per day, sufficient for a population of 12,500, estimated to be the size of the garrison town of Arles at that time. Remains of this mill can still be seen.

Waterwheels may have been in use in China as early as the fifth century BC, and by the third and fourth centuries BC were abundant. Furthermore their use was not restricted to milling corn almost exclusively, as in areas under Roman influence, but extended to a number of operations such as working bellows for iron smelting and working trip hammers for a variety of purposes such as iron forges, hulling rice and crushing minerals. Most common was the horizontal wheel, activated by a tangential jet of water, and thus a direct ancestor of the modern turbine.

The settled, urbanised, way of life became possible in Mesopotamia and Egypt as a result of effective irrigation systems and the cultivation of cereals. The great rivers – the Euphrates, Tigris and Nile – provided the water to irrigate the productive soils of the Mesopotamian plains and the fertile strip fringing the Nile, and wheat and barley, which were already being cultivated in Neolithic times, provided the essential cereals. Conditions that favoured the cultivation of crops also favoured the domestication and breeding of animals, such as goats and sheep, which could provide food and the raw material for clothing and other uses. Cattle also provided these commodities and could additionally be used as work animals. Donkeys and horses were bred to be beasts of burden and to be used for transportation. It was the need to keep a record of these crops and animals that led to the development of writing: owing to the durable nature of the hardened clay tablets, many such records have survived.

Two commonly occurring groups of wheat grew wild, Einkorn (with 2 sets of 7 chromosomes) and Emmer (with 4 sets of 7 chromosomes), but Emmer became the more widely cultivated, evidence of its use dating back to at least 5000 BC. The early harvesting of wild wheat by sickles or reaping knives – sharp flint flakes set in a wood or bone shaft – not only represented an important technological development in itself, but also had an important genetic influence on the cultivated wheat. Most wild wheat when harvested in this way shatters – that is, the seeds fall to the ground. Some mutants, however, did not shatter, and when planting and cultivation of wheat displaced the harvesting of wild wheat, it was these non-shattering seeds that became available for planting. Evidence for this has been found at ancient sites such as Jericho, close to where the wild forms of wheat still grow. Further evolution, combining diverse genetic materials from different species, has enabled wheat to adapt to different habitats. Barley has undergone a similar evolution, and other vegetables have also been domesticated.

A mace head in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford shows a pre-dynastic Egyptian king, called King Scorpion because he is portrayed with a scorpion hovering in the air in front of him, apparently presiding at a ceremony marking the commissioning of an important irrigation canal. Wearing the tall white crown of Upper Egypt, he is pictured standing on the bank of the canal, hoe in hand and three times larger than the men around him, projecting authority and power. Two of the smaller figures appear to be offering him seeds, while others are working on the canal banks, a nearby reed mat possibly serving to strengthen the banks or even to function as a sluice gate. There was probably a religious meaning to the ceremony, too, reflecting the divinity of the king and the sacredness of the Nile, which provided the life-giving waters.

Unlike the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile flooded rhythmically as a predictable event, and from August to early October proved most propitious to the growing of crops. This negated any need to build water-storage structures. Irrigation could be effected simply by controlling the floodwaters which spilled over the riverbanks flooding the adjacent river plains. This is known as basin irrigation. The method of control consisted of dividing the land along the river margins into basins by a rectangular grid of earthen bunds parallel, and at right angles, to the river, enclosing areas of 800 to 16,000 hectares. Floodwaters were first led into selected basins to a depth of 1–2m, allowed to soak for a month or so, and the excess water then drained off through sluices into adjacent lower-lying basins. The excess water in the final, and largest, basin was drained back to the river along a canal when the river level had dropped sufficiently. The seeds germinated easily in the mild winter climate, and grain crops were ready to harvest by mid-April.

The Egyptians practised some perennial irrigation, particularly for the watering of smaller vegetable plots. Water was lifted from the Nile and fed into channels supplying the plots, using shadufs or wheels of pots. The former, still used today, consists of a long, balanced wooden beam pivoted on top of an upright timber frame, often consisting simply of two posts and a cross-piece; a vertical rope attached to a water container is fixed to one end of the beam and is counterbalanced at the other end by a large stone or a wodge of dried clay. By hauling on the rope the operator lowers the water container into the river or canal until it is filled, then with minimum effort raises the counterbalanced filled container and empties it into the irrigation channel.

Hydraulic works for irrigation reached their apogee in Ancient Egypt in the Middle Kingdom beginning about 2040 BC. The greatest pharaoh of the period, Amenemhet III, ruled for nearly fifty years, a period of social solidity and high intellectual attainment. A major canal (now known as the Bahr Yusuf – ‘Joseph’s arm’) was constructed, possibly by re-opening an old branch of the Nile, to Lake Moeris (now Lake Qurun) in the Fayum, a large depression situated to the west of the Nile, which Herodotus thought, incorrectly, to have been dug by man and the excavated soil thrown into the Nile to be carried away.

The Bahr Yusuf Canal leaves the present course of the Nile and runs parallel to it for some 240km before discharging into the Fayum. After passing close to the remains of the mud-brick pyramid of Lahun, it swings to the west to pass close to the remains of the Hawara mud-brick pyramid and splits into a large number of irrigation channels, some reaching Lake Qurun (Birket Qurun). The surface of this lake is 40km below sea level and, although much smaller than 4,000 years ago, it still has a surface area of about 230km2. The work carried out by the Middle Kingdom pharaohs, Sesostris II (1897–1878 BC, also known as Senwosret II) and Amenemhet III (1844–1797 BC), consisted of partially draining the lake to increase the area of fertile land, canalise the Bahr Yusuf channel and dig linking channels to enable widespread irrigation throughout the Fayum, and to build structures in the canal and irrigation channels to control and possibly measure the flow of water to the fields. The exact nature of the structures is a matter of some dispute: Strabo refers to them as artificial barriers and Diodorus describes them as both skilful and expensive. This may suggest some sort of weir structure, which could be raised or lowered to allow and control the flow of water and, by measurement of the depth of water over the weir, give a measure of volumetric rate of flow.

The dedication of the town of Shebet to the crocodile god, and the transfer by Sesostris II of his capital from Memphis to Illahun on the fringe of the Fayum, attests to the importance of the region in Middle Kingdom Egypt. Its importance derived from its extreme fertility, made possible by the enlightened work of the Middle Kingdom pharaohs and their engineers in draining and irrigating the land. Further extensive operations in the Fayum were carried out in Ptolemaic times, which, in addition to drainage and irrigation work, included setting up the ancient town of Philadelphia some 40km north-east of Shebet. It is well known to papyrologists for the large number of mummy portraits (painted on wooden panels or shrouds covering the bodies) and other documents found in its necropolis. The Fayum remains today the garden of Egypt, with its abundant harvests of vegetables and sugar cane, and its groves of citrus fruits, nuts and olives.

In order to discharge their responsibilities, the provincial governors in pharaonic Egypt employed inspectors to oversee works in progress and to exercise control over the usage of the irrigation waters. Inspectors were also sent out by the central authorities to assess crop yields for taxation purposes. This led to the establishment of a civil service structure at local provincial level and at central government level.

Although the priests used astronomical observations to maintain a mystical hold on the people, these observations also served the practical purpose of predicting rhythmical events such as the inundation of the Nile. These predictions were backed by the installation of vertical scales or nilometers marked in cubits and fractions of cubits, installed at various locations on walls or quays flanking the Nile. Calculations had to be made for a wide range of purposes: land areas; volumes of water, earthworks and crops; rates and quantities of water flow. This needed some understanding of mathematics, geometry and trigonometry.

Herodotus not only understood well the importance of the great rivers of Egypt and Mesopotamia in providing the water to irrigate these parched lands, but also the different methods employed arising from the differences in the two river systems. He observed, too, that the (cultivatable) black and friable soil of Egypt, formed of the silt brought down the Nile from Ethiopia, differed from the stony and clayey soil of neighbouring Arabia and Syria. He also comments on the crops grown: