The Greatest Engineering Power of All Time

A History of Mankind (231)

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Roman engineers built up on the Hellenistic heritage of technical sophistication to create engineering marvels using Greek technologies like cranes, windlasses – originally invented by Archimedes – water-pumps and water-wheels, a simultaneous Chinese invention, like those deployed to drain the Rio Tinto mines in Baetica¹. Many of the roughly twenty bridges and dams in Iran that survived from antiquity into the 21^st century were built by Roman prisoners of war².

In Las Medulas near modern Leon in northern Spain, the largest gold mine in the entire empire left behind a two-kilometer crater, hundreds of meters deep, produced by the use of water power to undermine the edges of the growing opencast and to wash millions of cubic meters of debris further down the site’s main mountain. Operations of similar complexity, using less water, allowed the exploitation of major quarries producing colored stones in the Egyptian desert, like those of Mons Claudianus – producing a grey granite – and Mons Porphyrites, producing the much-prized purple porphyry³.

Similar know-how was also applied to popular entertainment: so, in order to remedy the spectators' difficulties in following the races at Rome's Circus Maximus, Agrippa in 33 BC had a second-lap counting mechanism installed. This had seven dolphins, set near the finish line: with each lap around the track, water would spurt from the dolphins' mouths and pour down into a pool below.