Engineering the Ancient World

Dick Parry

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780750938334
• eBook ISBN: 9780752495507
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• 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