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This article will present the cases for and against Archimedes as the original
inventor of the most striking and famous device attributed to him, the
water screw. It takes the form of a case study that focuses as much on the
context and motives for the invention as on the possible inventor himself.
In brief, an Archimedean water screw consists of a cylinder containing several
continuous helical walls that, when the entire cylinder is rotated on its
longitudinal axis, scoop up water at the open lower end and dump it out
the upper end. Both Aage Drachmann and John Oleson have summarized
the literary and archaeological evidence from the classical world suggesting
that Archimedes (287–212 B.C.) was the first person to design and construct
a mechanical water-raising screw, and they accept him as the inventor.1
Stephanie Dalley, on the other hand, reinterpreting a passage of cuneiform
Akkadian and a statement by Strabo, has proposed that the water screw was
Dr. Dalley is Shillito Research Fellow in Assyriology at the Oriental Institute and
Somerville College, University of Oxford. She has published primary editions of cuneiform
texts from excavations in Iraq and Syria and from museums in Britain, as well as
specialized studies and more general books. She has translated all the Assyrian texts used
in this article. Dr. Oleson is professor of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of
Victoria, British Columbia.His areas of fieldwork and research include ancient hydraulic
technology, Roman harbors and their construction, and the Roman Near East. He has
published widely in all these areas. Except where otherwise noted, he has translated all
the Greek and Latin texts cited in the article. The authors are grateful to a number of
scholars for their assistance with this article, including Richard Dight, Peter Kingsley,
David Oates, Simon Raikes, and the Technology and Culture referees.
©2003 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
0040-165X/03/4401-0001$8.00
1. Aage G. Drachmann, “The Screw of Archimedes,” Actes du VIIIe Congres International
d’Histoire des Sciences, Florence-Milan (Florence, 1958), 3:940–43; John Peter
Oleson, Greek and Roman Mechanical Water-Lifting Devices: The History of a Technology
(Toronto, 1984), 291–94, and “Water-Lifting,” in Handbook of Ancient Water Technology,
ed.O¨ rjan Wikander (Leiden, 2000), 217–302, esp. 242–47 on the water screw.
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already known during the reign of the Assyrian king Sennacherib (704–681
B.C.) and that the design was put to use in spectacular fashion to water his
palace garden at Nineveh.2
The precise identification of the inventor of a device or procedure is
problematic, since nearly every technological advance is the result of long
accumulation of human experience. As any modern patent lawyer can
attest, it is difficult to document the originality of even a complicated or
specialized technique or device. This problem is compounded for ancient
technological innovations because firsthand documentary records are rare,
and historical texts, where they exist, can be unclear, mistaken, or tendentious.
3 The frequent lists of “inventors” in Pliny’s Natural History (especially
7.191–215) are an example of the doubtful attribution in the mid-first century
of particular devices and techniques to individuals. Ancient authors
occasionally preserve a story of invention that sounds convincing and fits
into the known contemporary cultural and technological context—for
example, Vitruvius’s charming depiction (On Architecture 9.8.2–4) of the
youthful inventions of the Alexandrian Ctesibius (third century B.C.), who
provided helpful gadgets for his father’s barber shop.4
Memorable and entertaining as such stories are, there is no method by
which modern scholars can distinguish genuine biographical detail from an
etiological fiction containing plausible details added to increase the immediacy.
Fortunately, identification of a specific individual inventor is far less
important or interesting than an understanding of the historical and cultural
context that spawned the invention and fostered its reception. The precocious
Ctesibius sounds like the young Thomas Edison, enlivening his
modest surroundings with innovative gadgets, setting the stage for his later
accomplishments through induction, invention from the bottom up. Occasionally
we hear of the motives and procedures of a royal patron in the classical
world, of top-down innovation. The historian Diodorus Siculus (Diodorus
of Sicily), for example, writing in the mid-first century B.C., describes
a sort of think tank set up by the ambitious King Dionysius I of Syracuse
2. Stephanie Dalley, “Ancient Mesopotamian Gardens and the Identification of the
Hanging Gardens of Babylon Resolved,” Garden History 21 (1993): 8–10; “Nineveh,
Babylon and the Hanging Gardens: Cuneiform and Classical Sources Reconciled,” Iraq
56 (1994): 51–54;“More about the Hanging Gardens,” in Of Pots and Plans: Papers on the
Archaeology and History of Mesopotamia and Syria Presented to David Oates in Honour of
his 75th Birthday, ed. Lamia Al-Gailani Werr et al. (Cambridge, 2002). The main focus of
Dalley’s research is her proposal that the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, praised
by Greek and Latin authors, were actually the gardens of Sennacherib’s palace at
Nineveh.
3. P. Edfou 8, a third-century B.C. papyrus document from Egypt, may be an exception;
see Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting, 146–47, and “Water-Lifting,” 289.
4. See the discussions of this passage in Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting, 109–10,
and “Water-Lifting,” 290. Many of the passages in Greek and Latin authors on inventors
are gathered in John Humphrey, John Oleson, and Andrew Sherwood, Greek and Roman
Technology: A Sourcebook (London, 1998), 588–97.
DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw
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(430–367 B.C.) to solve a particular problem of military technology (History
14.41.3–4, 42.1). The high wages, performance bonuses, and focused work
groups would not be out of place in a modern computer company:
Dionysius, therefore, immediately assembled technicians, commanding
them to come from the cities he ruled, and luring them from Italy
and Greece—and even from Carthaginian territory—with high wages.
For he intended to manufacture weapons in great numbers and projectiles
of every sort. . . .After assembling a great number of technicians,
he divided them into work-groups according to each one’s own
talents. . . .
In fact, the catapult was invented [euJrevqh] in Syracuse on this
occasion, since the most able technicians were gathered together from
all over into one place. The high wages stimulated their enthusiasm,
along with the numerous prizes offered to those judged the best.
A similar situation later on in Alexandria is reported by Philo of Byzantium
(fl. ca. 200 B.C.), who in his book on catapults (Belopoeika 50), reports
that Alexandrian craftsmen derived systematic rules for catapult construction
“because they were heavily subsidized by kings who loved prestige and
fostered technology.”5 By the third century, at least, the prestige of the
patron seems to have become as important as the practical benefit of these
innovations.
The public inscriptions of the Near Eastern,Greek, and Roman cultures
naturally celebrate the accomplishments of the great persons who set them
up, and all ancient historians relied heavily on the biographical approach.
In such a climate, the innovations of an anonymous technician were routinely
attributed to his patron, and credit for an invention was more readily
assigned to a famous personality—divine, human, or eponymous—than
to a research group, a slave, or no one at all. In particular, the name of a
known inventor or scientist could easily attract the credit for anonymous
inventions appropriate to his métier. Stories about the young Ctesibius, of
course, were repeated, or even created, because of his later accomplishments.
It has also been suggested that some of the inventions attributed in
antiquity to Archimedes, the most famous ancient technician and polymath,
may have been developed by other individuals, possibly long before
he lived. The genius of Archimedes, like that of Leonardo da Vinci, became
the stuff of legend even during his lifetime.6
During April 1999 the authors served as joint technical advisors and participants
in the production of a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
television film titled “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon,”which examined the
theory that the water screw was known in Assyria in the seventh century B.C.
5. Translation,Michael J. T. Lewis, “The Hellenistic Period,” in Wikander, 634.
6. Eduard J. Dijksterhuis, Archimedes (Copenhagen, 1956), 14–32; Dennis L. Simms,
“Archimedes the Engineer,” History of Technology 17 (1995): 46, 65–67.
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In the course of the film Oleson supervised the construction of two full-scale
wooden water screws and shadufs (counterbalanced sweeps with buckets,
used for raising water) to experiment with techniques of irrigation, and
Dalley advised on the casting of a small bronze water screw. The wooden
water screws were built largely according to the detailed instructions given by
Vitruvius (On Architecture 10.6.1–4), while the bronze water-screw design
was based on a description in an Assyrian text called The Palace without a
Rival. Neither of us having succeeded in convincing the other about the
chronology of the water screw during the filming, we subsequently decided
to collaborate on this article, presenting the evidence in a more scholarly
fashion and with a focus on the cultural context of invention and innovation
in both periods.
In the course of our discussions, we became acutely aware of the extent
of the gulf between scholars who study the classical cultures and those who
study the cultures of the ancient Near East, especially Mesopotamia. Historians
of “ancient” technology have traditionally given preferential treatment
to the accomplishments of the Bronze Age Egyptian and the Greek
and Roman cultures, while ancient Mesopotamian achievements tend to be
relegated to the specialist publications of Sumerian scholars or Assyriologists,
such as the recent synthesis by Ariel Bagg.7 Given the deep roots of
Greco-Roman culture in the Near East, this lack of exchange is a serious
impediment to research.
One cause for this gap in communication arises from the separation of
the study of Indo-European languages from that of the Semitic languages.
In addition, judgments about racial and linguistic superiority or polemical
views of “orientalism” were for a long period innate in various branches of
learning in western scholarship. The Black Athena controversy has recently
made these issues very clear, at least in North America.8 Another factor is
the esoteric difficulty of cuneiform, progress in the understanding of
which, though rapid in recent years, has yet to make its way into general
works such as encyclopedias and general overviews. There are far greater
gaps in the information than is the case for the Greek and Roman cultures.
A seemingly obvious question to a classicist, “Why is there no evidence of
the water screw for several centuries?” is astounding to an Assyriologist,
7. Ariel Bagg, Assyrische Wasserbauten (Mainz, 2000); see the detailed review by
Stephanie Dalley forthcoming in Archiv fur Orientforschung 48. Bagg (201–3, 206–7,
277–79) objects to Dalley’s proposal that Sennacherib made use of the water screw
largely on the basis that no other early evidence for the device exists.
8. In essence, many African-Americans accept Martin Bernal’s proposal that the
Egyptians were blacks, that the culture and accomplishments of the Greeks were based
on black Egyptian accomplishments, and that this cultural heritage has been repressed as
a result of Eurocentrism and racial prejudice. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic
Roots of Classical Civilization, 2 vols. (London, 1987). For a critique of Bernal’s
argument, see Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, eds., Black Athena Revisited
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996).
DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw
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9. Note, for example, Pliny’s account of the inventors of navigation, Natural History
7.206–9. The phenomenon in general is discussed in detail by Adolph Kleingünther,
Prw`to~ euJrethv~ (Leipzig, 1933), and John F.Healey, Pliny the Elder on Science and Technology
(Oxford, 1999), 347–52.
10. See, for example, Albert K. Grayson, “Assyria: Sennacherib and Esarhaddon
(704–669 B.C.),” Cambridge Ancient History, rev. ed., vol. 3, pt. 2 (Cambridge 1991),
103–119.
11. Thorkild Jacobsen and Seton Lloyd, Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan (Chicago,
1935); Fuad Safar and Faraj Basmachi, “Sennacherib’s Project for Supplying Erbil with
Water” (in Arabic), parts 1 and 2, Sumer 2 (1946): 50–52; 3 (1947): 23–25. Dalley is grateful
to Lamia Al-Gailani Werr for translating the Arabic text.
who has to take into account, on a regular basis, long distances between
oases of information. Greek culture follows an unbroken thread of tradition
through the Renaissance, whereas the civilization of Mesopotamia has
had to be reconstructed after complete loss. Its attractions are less obvious:
even in modern times, with an increase in multicultural perspectives and
easy travel, the decayed mud-brick palaces of Assyria cannot compete with
the stone monuments of the classical world, and this is a severe disadvantage
nowadays when visual media are dominant. Finally, the phenomenon
of the named, national culture-hero has affected our appreciation of
ancient Mesopotamian culture. In ancient Mesopotamia, creative efforts,
whether in literature or technology, were either anonymous or attributed to
the royal patron. Among Greeks and Romans, inventions or principles
could be attributed, rightly or wrongly, to famous men such as Archimedes
and Pythagoras, and appealing human-interest stories recorded or constructed.
9 But despite the anonymity of their engineers, the Mesopotamian
cultures made major advances in hydraulic technology.
Assyrian Kings and Technology
Sennacherib ruled a vast area that stretched from Tarsus, in what is now
southern Turkey, to the eastern border of Egypt, and from Armenia to Bahrain
(fig. 1). It was the duty of a successful Assyrian king not only to enrich
the nation through conquest but also to display power through fine buildings,
the patronage of great art, and engineering works to manage the supply
of water to his great cities. Provided that the technology was available,
he had the manpower and the raw materials to achieve whatever he wanted,
regardless of time, expense, or detriment to the health of his workmen.10
Numerous long inscriptions survive that suggest Sennacherib had a
direct personal interest in engineering, beyond what his position required,
and the material remains of spectacular canals, tunnels and an aqueduct
prove the veracity of the texts.11 He channeled water from several mountain
streams east of Nineveh across varied terrain, making eighteen different
channels, beginning at Bavian, 50 kilometers away to the northeast. The
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flow crossed a wide valley on an aqueduct more than 280 meters long and
22 meters wide, built up on freestanding stone arches, and entered Nineveh
at just the right height to irrigate the lower portions of the garden built outside
Sennacherib’s palace. Some of the water was diverted to irrigate orchards
and fields to the north of Nineveh.12 To accommodate surges in the
water flow, Sennacherib constructed an artificial marshland, an excellent
solution that municipal engineers have recently reinvented; such marshes
absorb and delay flow, filter the water, and attract wildlife. He was particularly
pleased to have designed an automatic sluice that “opens by itself,
without using a spade or a shovel, and allows the waters of prosperity to
flow. Its gate is not opened by any action of men’s hands.”13 At Arbela,
Sennacherib built an underground tunnel to bring high-quality water into
the city, constructing it like a qanat (an underground aqueduct with shafts
to the surface at intervals), and recorded his deed on an inscription (badly
eroded) at the entrance.14 Works such as these show how completely the
Assyrians had mastered the principles of hydraulic engineering.
12. Julian E. Reade, “Studies in Assyrian Geography: Sennacherib and the Waters of
Nineveh,” Revue d’Assyriologie 72 (1978): 47–72, 157–80, and Reallexicon der Assyriologie,
s.v. “Nineveh,” 406.
13. Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (Glückstadt, Ger., 1980), s.v. “narpasu.” The numerous
volumes of this dictionary that have appeared over fifty years are organized by letters
of the alphabet.
14. Safar and Basmachi; see also Jørgen Laessøe,“Reflexions on Modern and Ancient
FIG. 1 Map of Mesopotamia and the Levant. (Drawing by Stephanie Dalley.)
DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw
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Water Screws in Sennacherib’s Palace Gardens at Nineveh?
In an Akkadian inscription written on a clay prism, Sennacherib describes
at great length his main achievements in improving Nineveh with a
palace, a palace garden, and various measures for water control. His southwest
palace, known as “the Palace without a Rival,” and the gardens that were
raised up beside it are described together and termed “a Wonder for All
Peoples.”The text touches on both of the topics important to a discussion of
the water screw before Archimedes: bronze casting and water control.15
One passage mentions large bronzes of various shapes for a variety of
purposes, cast using a new method, and the installation of some of them for
the purpose of raising water:
Whereas in former times the kings my forefathers had created copper
statues imitating real forms, to put on display inside temples, and in
their method of work they had exhausted all the craftsmen for lack of
skill and failure to understand principles [?]; they needed so much oil,
wax and tallow [or lanolin] for the work that they caused a shortage
in their own lands—I, Sennacherib, . . . knowledgeable in all kinds of
work, took much advice and deep thought over making that work:
great pillars of copper, colossal striding lions, such as no previous king
had ever constructed before me, with the technical skill that [the god]
Ninshiku brought to perfection in me, and . . . I invented a technique
for copper and did it skillfully. I created clay molds as if by divine
intelligence for great cylinders and alamittu palms, tree of riches;
twelve fierce lion-colossi together with twelve mighty bull-colossi
which were perfect castings; twenty-two cow-colossi invested with
joyous allure, plentifully endowed with sexual attraction; and I poured
copper into them over and over again; I made the castings of them
as perfectly as if they had only weighed half a shekel each. . . .
In order to draw water up all day long I had ropes, bronze wires
and bronze chains made, and instead of shadufs [makate] I set up the
great cylinders [gisˇmahhu] and alamittu palms over cisterns. I made
those royal lodges look just right. I raised the height of the surroundings
of the palace to be a Wonder for all Peoples. I gave it the name:
“Incomparable Palace.” A park imitating the Amanus mountains I laid
out next to it, with all kinds of aromatic plants, orchard fruit trees. . .16
Oriental Waterworks,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 7 (1953): 29. The question of the
qanat at this date is discussed in more detail by Dalley, “Water Management in Assyria
from the Ninth to Seventh Centuries B.C.,” ARAM 13/14 (2002): 443–60.
15. D. D. Luckenbill, The Annals of Sennacherib (Chicago, 1924), 94–127.
16. Translation by Dalley. For makate, see Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (Glückstadt,
Ger., 1977), s.v. “makutu.” The sequence of sentences is particularly disjointed here, and
results from the way in which royal inscriptions reused and recombined passages from
other, more extensive inscriptions.
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Some of the bronze castings were architectural items in the form of animals,
probably used as column bases. It has been calculated that they
weighed up to 43 tons, an enormous mass made possible by new casting
methods.17 The items used to raise water are described as a “great tree
trunk” (gisˇmahhu), which is the word used for a cylinder (for example, in
mathematical problem texts), and as an alamittu palm tree. In fact, it is the
molds that are described as being these two, separate items, not the casting
itself, which Dalley interprets as a bronze water screw. The weight of such a
bronze screw cannot be calculated with any accuracy, since length, diameter
and thickness of metal are all unknown, but if we assume dimensions
similar to those of wooden Roman water screws or the BBC reproductions
(3 meters long, with a diameter of 0.45 meters), they would have weighed
2 or 3 tons.18
Dalley has proposed the hypothesis that the term alamittu was used
metaphorically to indicate the spiraling helix of such a water screw.19 The
spiral form itself had been familiar to engineers in both northern and
southern Mesopotamia since the Middle Bronze Age, and was used in mudbrick
columns constructed of trapezoidal bricks laid in a decorative spiral
pattern (fig. 2), some of them still visible in Sennacherib’s day.20 In addition,
some stone and terra-cotta sculptures show palms with a spiral-patterned
trunk.21 The difficulty of finding an appropriate technical term in
the languages of preindustrial cultures is well illustrated by the Assyrian
usage of gisˇmahhu, “great tree-trunk,” for a hollow cylinder, and by the
Greek use of kocliva~, “snail,” for a spiral or helix. Nevertheless, the recognition
that a helical form hidden inside a cylinder could be used to raise
water is a significant conceptual leap.
17. Stephanie Dalley,“Neo-Assyrian Textual Evidence for Bronze-Working Centres,”
in Bronze-Working Centres ofWestern Asia, c. 1000–539 B.C., ed. J. Curtis (London, 1988),
97–110.
18. Personal communication with Dalley by Andrew Lacey of Bronze Age Castings
in London, who carried out the casting of a small bronze screw for the BBC program.
19. Dalley, “Ancient Mesopotamian Gardens” and “Nineveh, Babylon and the
Hanging Gardens” (both n. 2 above). For a duplicate text, see Alexander Heidel, “The
Octagonal Sennacherib Prism in the Iraq Museum,” Sumer 9 (1953): 117–88.
20. See David Oates, “Innovations in Mud-Brick: Decorative and Structural Techniques
in Ancient Mesopotamia,” World Archaeology 21 (1990): 388–406, and Eleanor
Robson, Mesopotamian Mathematics (Oxford, 1999), 142–45. The ziggurat built by
Sargon II at Khorsabad was reconstructed as a spiral staircase rising up a circular tower,
and it is often shown thus in books on the history of architecture. However, a recent
study has indicated that the tower consisted of superimposed rectangles, on which a spiral
staircase could not have been fitted; see Jean-Claude Margueron, “E´ tude architecturale,”
in Khorsabad (Paris, 1995), 190–93.
21. For example, at Larsa, Ur, Tell al Rimah, Tell Haddad, Tell Basmusian. The identification
of the alamittu palm as Chamaerops humilis in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary
(Glückstadt, 1963), s.v. “alamittu,” can now be seen to be incorrect; Dalley,“More about
the Hanging Gardens” (n. 2 above).
22. Andreas Fuchs, Die Inschriften Sargons II aus Khorsabad, rev. ed. (Göttingen,
1994), 128–30; see also Dalley, “Neo-Assyrian Textual Evidence.”
23. On the issues surrounding early ironworking, see John E. Curtis et al., “Neo-Assyrian
Ironworking Technology,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 123
DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw
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Sennacherib’s new water-lifting device for his palace garden was cast in
bronze, and thus combined his metallurgical and hydraulic interests. His
father, Sargon II, was also personally interested in the techniques of mining,
smelting, and alloying.22 To show such a detailed interest in technical matters,
to be enthusiastic about innovative technology, is unusual in the writings
of Mesopotamian kings. At the time when Sennacherib recorded his
achievements, the craft of the bronzeworker was steadily being displaced by
the new craft of the ironworker. The process of change was a slow one,
partly for reasons of social status. The bronzeworker had a high standing in
society and was attached to the palaces and temples from which his patronage
came. The ironworker, on the other hand, came as a tinker, a refugee, a
displaced foreigner, and his material, iron ore, was common. Worked iron
could not be reused as easily as bronze and decayed more readily, which
made it unsuitable for storing as treasure or using as currency.23 In these circumstances,
bronze production grew specialized, drawing upon its royal
FIG. 2 Spiral column façade at Tell al Rimah, northern Iraq, Middle Bronze Age.
(David Oates, “The Excavations at Tell Al Rimah, 1966,” Iraq 29 (1967), pl.
XXXII.b.)
(1979): 369–90; Radomir Pleiner and J. K. Bjorkman, “The Assyrian Iron Age: The
History of Iron in Assyrian Civilizations,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society 118 (1974): 283–313; Theodore A.Wertime and James D. Muhly, The Coming of
the Age of Iron (New Haven, Conn., 1980).
24. Herbert Maryon and Harold J. Plenderleith, “Fine Metalwork,” in A History of
Technology, ed. Charles Singer et al. (Oxford, 1954), 1:623–27. On the history of bronze
hollow casting and the use of piece molds in the Near East and later in Greece, see Denys
E. L. Haynes, The Technique of Greek Bronze Statuary (Mainz, 1992).Many of the bronze
casting techniques used by the Greeks were developed in the Near East.
25. Andrew Lacey estimates that the difference was about 100 degrees Centigrade.
26. Prudence Harper, Joan Aruz, and Françoise Talon, The Royal City of Susa (New
York, 1992), 132–35.
27. In the Louvre, dated by the Elamite inscription they carry; Friedrich W. König,
Die elamischen Konigsinschriften (Graz, Aus., 1965), 17 n. 45.
28. Dalley thanks Peter Northover for this calculation.
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patronage to create works of art and interesting devices. Sennacherib, like
his father, was an ideal patron because he took a personal interest in the processes
involved and described them in his royal inscriptions.
Hollow casting is attested in Mesopotamia as early as the dynasty of
Agade (circa 2334–2279 B.C.) by the bronze head of Sargon found at
Nineveh.24 The outer layer of an object was hollow cast by a typical lost-wax
technique, but using a copper alloy containing only 1 percent tin along with
some lead, iron, silver, nickel, bismuth, and cobalt. The object was then
filled with a different copper alloy, composed of 11 percent tin and significantly
less of the other added metals, the core thus having a much lower
melting point and so not melting the outer layer.25 Concentric casting with
different alloys was practiced in Elam on the border of Babylonia in the
fourteenth century B.C., as attested by the statue of Napirasu, which even in
its present truncated state is 1.29 meters tall and weighs 1,750 kilograms.26
The solid bulls and lions cast by Sennacherib were presumably made by a
similar method, except that Sennacherib claims to have dispensed with the
wax and tallow used in the first stage of the casting in order to produce even
larger objects than were previously possible.
Two hollow bronze cylinders from Susa that date to the twelfth century
indicate clearly the technological heritage Sennacherib could draw upon in
casting his cylindrical water-lifting devices.27 The one on display in the
Louvre is 4.36 meters long, 0.18 meters in diameter, its irregular walls
around 1.5 centimeters thick—more or less the same length as the water
screws proposed for Nineveh, but smaller in diameter. The estimated
weight is 125–30 kilograms.28 Although the casting of a helix inside a cylinder
is a more complex task, it is clear Sennacherib had at his disposal the
metallurgical skills needed to produce large bronze water screws.
As part of the BBC program, and in an attempt to reconstruct Assyrian
casting procedures, Andrew Lacey cast a small-scale water screw, using 60
kilograms of bronze. The furnace was constructed simply and in the open
29. That is, the Byzantine writer of paradoxes (i.e., marvels), not the Hellenistic
engineer. Philo of Byzantium, the engineering author of circa 200 B.C., keeps popping up
in the discussion of the water screw, usually because of a confusion with an author better
referred to as Philo Byzantinus or Philo the Paradoxographer, a paradoxographer and
rhetorician of the fourth century A.D. The later Philo wrote a handbook on the seven
wonders of the ancient world and describes the use of water screws at the Hanging
Gardens of Babylon.Wilhelm Kroll, “Philon (49),” Realencyclopadie, vol. 20, bk. 1 (1960),
54–55; Kai Brodersen, Reisefuhrer zu den Sieben Weltwundern, Philon von Byzanz und
andere antike Texte (Frankfurt, 1992), 15. Peter A. Clayton and Martin Price, eds.,The
Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (London, 1988), 170, are aware of the late date of the
Philo who wrote on the seven wonders, but one of the contributors to their book, Irving
L. Finkel, “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon” (38–58), unaccountably refers to him in
the text as “Philo of Byzantium who probably flourished around 250 B.C.” (45). This
inconsistency, combined with the popularity of Clayton and Price’s book, has misled
many later authors, including Dalley; see “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens”
(n. 2 above), 53.
But it is nonetheless useful to consider why Philo of Byzantium (the Hellenistic
technical writer, fl. ca. 200 B.C.) does not mention the water screw anywhere in the fragments
of his work that have survived in Greek, or in Latin and Arabic translations. Of
the possible nine books of his compendium, only two are wholly extant, and a few other
fragments deal only with war machines. The two books that remain would not necessarily
have included the screw, since the Parasceuastica (preserved in Greek) deals with catapults
and his Pneumatica (preserved in Arabic) deals with siphons and related devices.
So it is possible that Philo the engineer, and his teacher Ctesibius of Alexandria (floruit
270 B.C.), knew of the screw in Egypt before the time of Archimedes, and we have been
unlucky in the chance survival of texts that happen not to mention screws. This silence
of the sources, of course, allows one to argue exactly the opposite as well. Hellenistic
technical writing, like Assyrian landscape relief, survives only erratically.
DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw
11
air, and the casting accomplished largely with tools and materials appropriate
to an early Iron Age culture. Lacey fashioned a wood-and-rope model
for the helix, coated with clay and suspended inside a separate cylinder of
baked clay that encased the whole. The molds for the helix and the cylinder
were separate, and the casting they produced was a unitary bronze screw
with a hollow center, the helix and the surrounding cylinder cast as a single
piece. A separate bronze rod was then inserted as the axle.No wax was used,
since Sennacherib implies that wax was not needed for his new method of
casting, or at least not in such huge quantities as previously. The shape is
ideal for casting, since there are no awkward angles where air might be
trapped and the metal flows smoothly through the mold. There do not
appear to be any technical obstacles to the casting of a large water screw as
a single unit, other than the difficulties inherent in any large casting project.
Dalley has argued that two passages in classical literature also imply the
existence of water screws in Sennacherib’s garden at Nineveh: Strabo Geography
16.1.5 and the later Philo of Byzantium, better known as Philo the
Paradoxographer, On the Seven Wonders of the World 1.4.29 Both passages
describe the method of raising water for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Dalley has made a good case that these gardens never existed in Babylon
30. See Dalley,“Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens,” also “Why Did Herodotus
not Mention the Hanging Gardens?” forthcoming in Herodotus and His World:
Essays in Memory of George Forrest, ed. Peter Derow and Robert Parker (Oxford).
31. Strabo traveled widely (cf. Geography 2.5.11), particularly in the Near East and
Egypt (2.5.12), but the precise extent of his journeys is unclear. Curtius RufusHistory of
Alexander 5.1.32–35.
32. Ctesias of Cnidus, Persica, in Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker,
vol. 3, pt. C (Leiden, 1958), 484–85, no. 688, frag. 34a-b. See Oleson, Mechanical
Water-Lifting (n. 1 above), 39–41. The reconstruction by Stevenson of an irrigation system
for the gardens based on wheels with compartmented rims, turned by treading,
is essentially feasible, but not supported by any archaeological or literary evidence:
D. W. W. Stevenson, “A Proposal for the Irrigation of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,”
Iraq 54 (1992): 35–55.
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proper, but that later authors knew Nineveh under the name Babylon and
were describing Sennacherib’s garden in Nineveh.30 If she is correct, Strabo’s
description of Babylon in the later first century B.C. may be derived
from some earlier source, even though his description of the Near East
seems to be based in part on personal travel. Quintus Curtius Rufus also
records that the gardens (like the other world wonders) were still flourishing
in his own day (first century A.D.?).31 The apparent transfer of the
Hanging Gardens from Nineveh, later known as “Old Babylon,” on the
Tigris, to Babylon on the Euphrates was permanent. Many travelers confused
the two rivers because of numerous branching streams and canals
connecting them.
Strabo wrote (Geography 16.1.5): “The topmost story is approached by
a stairway that has water screws [kocliva~] installed alongside, by means of
which those assigned to the task used to raise water up continuously into
the gardens from the Euphrates.” The arrangement makes technological
sense. A series of water screw installations was constructed from the river
to the top of the garden structure, parallel to stairs providing access presumably
both to the individuals rotating the water screws and to other service
personnel, as well as to those seeking pleasure. Strabo says the screws
were set alongside steps that led to the top of the terraced garden, possibly
a stepped corridor protected from the sun by a mud-brick barrel vault or
leafy arbors. There is a similar passage in a description of the same “Gardens
of Babylon” by his contemporary Diodorus Siculus (History 2.10.6):
“There was one
with shafts from the highest level and water-lifting
machines [o[rgana] by means of which a quantity of water was drawn
up from the river, although no one outside could see the activity.”
There is no way to determine what sort of water-lifting device Diodorus
thought was in use here, although the mention of “shafts” [diatomav~]
might imply a vertical lift by means of ropes, rather than a hidden, sloping
corridor for water screws. In this case, the animal-operated bucket and pulley
(the cˇerd) may be considered an option, and it was known in Mesopotamia
by at least the fourth century B.C.32 Neither Strabo nor Diodorus,
33. Translation based in part on that of David Oates in Finkel, 46; see also Brodersen,
24–25. Although late and a rhetorician, the reputation of Philo the Paradoxographer for
conveying accurate information about the ancient “wonders” has been upheld by Denys
E. L. Haynes, “Philo of Byzantium and the Colossus of Rhodes,” Journal of Hellenic
Studies 77 (1957): 311–12.
34. British Museum no. 124939. See Dalley, “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging
Gardens,” 51–52; Pauline Albenda, “Landscape Bas-Reliefs in the Bit Hilani of Ashurbanipal,”
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 224 (1976): 49–72, fig. 4.
35. Reade, “Studies in Assyrian Geography” (n. 12 above). Dalley deals with some of
these issues at length in “More about the Hanging Gardens” (n. 2 above).
DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw
13
however, refer to animals, and the long walkway needed for a cˇerd is likely
to have been visible to onlookers.
The account of the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon” in the handbook to
the Seven Wonders of the World written by Philo the Paradoxographer in the
fourth century A.D. is derived from unknown sources, and rendered in typically
florid Byzantine Greek. Philo describes the associated irrigation system
as follows (1.4): “Streams of water issuing from springs higher up flow partly
downward in a direct course, partly are forced upwards through bends and
spirals to gush out higher up, being pushed through the twists of these
devices by mechanical forces. So, brought together in frequent and commodious
sources at a high level, these waters irrigate the whole garden. . . .”33
The mention of bends, spirals, and twists make it clear that the water-lifting
device intended could only be a water screw. The supply system is mixed,
however, since the author also mentions the provision of some of the water
by gravity flow, presumably to the lower portion of the gardens.
There is no other evidence in Assyrian inscriptions for knowledge of
the water screw, and no illustrations of water screws in surviving Assyrian
relief sculptures. The absence of representations, however, is hardly surprising,
given the low survival rate for these reliefs. The one relief sculpture
that may illustrate the garden itself is a badly damaged panel only 35 percent
complete (fig. 3). It was set up at Nineveh during the reign of Ashurbanipal,
Sennacherib’s grandson,who was unfortunately the last king to use
such bas-reliefs.34 Ever since its discovery, attempts have been made to compare
details of the garden relief with the descriptions of the Hanging Gardens
by Strabo and Diodorus Siculus: an aqueduct brings water into the
garden halfway up the slope, and artificial terraces thick with plants are
built up on stone vaults. One of the drawings made of a now missing fragment
has recently been recognized as providing further details of the gardens:
at the top of a steep slope is a pillared walkway supporting trees growing
on the thick roof. This detail is found in the depiction of the gardens by
Philo the Paradoxographer, who describes stout columns with beams set on
top supporting soil and trees.35 No water-lifting devices, however, are visible
in the surviving portion of the relief.
Of the known ancient water-lifting devices, the water screw best fits the
words of Sennacherib’s inscription as interpreted by Dalley, but neither the
36. Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting, 293
37. Dalley, “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens” (n. 2 above), 53.
38. Aage G. Drachmann,“The Crank in Graeco-Roman Antiquity,” in Changing Perspectives
in the History of Science, ed. Teich Mikulás (London, 1973), 33–51, marshals the
evidence that the crank did not exist in antiquity, with the possible exception of one
application by Archimedes to turn a pulley system. Simms (n. 6 above), 100 n. 5, rejects
even this limited use, probably correctly. Michael J. T. Lewis, Millstone and Hammer
(Hull, 1997), 15, presents a typically iconoclastic, but halfhearted, argument that the
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inscription nor the visual evidence prove the existence of the water screw in
the seventh century B.C. Only the passage in Strabo is early enough and
clear enough to carry some authority, and yet there is no guarantee that the
water screws he mentions appeared in his source or that the source itself
predates Archimedes. The water screws might even have been retrofitted at
the gardens after their invention by Archimedes, to replace some other, less
efficient method of irrigation.36
None of these passages mentions the method of turning the devices. In
her 1992 article, Dalley suggested that the screws she reconstructs were
turned with a crank mounted on the upper end of the axle.37 This approach,
however, is almost certainly wrong, since it seems that the principle
of the true crank was not discovered until the second century B.C., when
it appears in rudimentary form on rotary querns, and it was apparently not
put to use in ancient machinery.38 The inertia of such heavy bronze water
FIG. 3 The British Museum Nineveh garden relief. (Drawing by Stephanie
Dalley.)
small rotary hand quern might have been known as early as the seventh century B.C. The
evidence he cites is secondhand and extremely doubtful.
39. Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting (n. 1 above), 370–80; cf. Donald R. Hill and
M. T.Wright,“Byzantine and Arabic Mathematical Gearing,”Annals of Science 42 (1985):
87–138, and Derek J. de Solla Price, “Gears from the Greeks: The Antikythera Mechanism,
a Calendar Computer from ca. 80 B.C.,” Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society, n.s., 64 (1974): 7.
40. Described by Andrea Büsing-Kolbe, “Frühe griechische Türen,” Jahrbuch des
Deutsches-Archaologisches Institut 93 (1978): 66–174.
41. Armas Salonen, Die Turen des alten Mesopotamien (Helsinki, 1961), 120–21.
42. Dalley is grateful to Chris Addison for his help with calculations. They are based
on the weight of dried conifer timbers, and do not include the quite substantial weight
of the bronze bands, doorknobs, and locks. A total weight of 2 tons is realistic.
43. Peter R. S. Moorey, Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries (Winona
Lake, Ind., 1999), 337.
44. Diodorus Siculus History 2.10.2.
45. This figure is strikingly close to White’s estimate of the discharge of the Vitruvian
DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw
15
screws and the friction of their bearings would have made it impossible to
drive them by means of humans treading the top of the barrel, as shown in
Roman illustrations of wooden screws. Any method that requires cogs may
be discounted, since the cog also seems to have been unknown before the
Hellenistic period.39 The mention of ropes, wires, and chains in connection
with the water-lifting device of Sennacherib’s inscription suggests to Dalley
that the screws she restored at Nineveh were driven by a system of chains
wound around the barrels and hauled from below.
The hinge sockets that took the weight of the enormous doors at some
Near Eastern palaces provide a possible parallel for the bearings. These
doors were strapped to a vertical, cylindrical beam, which was set into a
copper-lined stone socket and rotated to open the door leaf.40 Lard and
other oils were supplied to doorkeepers, some presumably for lubrication.41
The wooden double doors with bands of bronze found at Balawat near
Nineveh weighed at least 1,120 kilograms.42 They date to about two hundred
years earlier than Sennacherib and were provided with sockets made
of a very hard, dense, black stone.43 The bearings for the screws might have
been similar, the shaft bedded in journal or thrust bearings lined with copper
or bronze and kept well oiled. The splashing water lifted by the screws
would also have served to lubricate the bearings.
Lack of evidence prohibits precise calculation of how much water had
to be raised from one terrace to another in the gardens at Nineveh. The
height of the terraces above the aqueduct is not known, nor do we know
how many trees or which species were grown there. Diodorus Siculus
describes the size of the garden as “like a Greek theater, 4 plethra on each
side” (roughly 120 meters).44 The BBC water screws lifted approximately
150 liters per minute (9,000 liters per hour) for short periods of time over
a height of about 1.5 meters.45 This discharge is equivalent to 162 cubic
water screw: 2,000 gallons/hour (9,092 liters/hour) by a one-man water screw over a
head of 4 feet (1.22 meters). See Kenneth D.White, Greek and Roman Technology(London,
1984), 194. See also Landels’s estimates of 9,600 to 14,100 liters/hour, in John G.
Landels, Engineering in the Ancient World (London, 1978), 63.
46. M. Arnoldi and Karlheinz Schaldach, “A Roman Cylinder Dial:Witness to a Forgotten
Tradition,” Journal of the History of Astronomy 28 (1997): 107–17.
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meters of water in an eighteen-hour day. Such a high rate of discharge suggests
that just one or two series of water screws would have been sufficient
to irrigate the gardens, perhaps working only a few hours each day. In addition,
not all the water would have had to be lifted to the highest terrace. Two
series of screws might have been used to lift water as high as the midpoint
of the total lift, with irrigation water being drawn off from the sumps on
each terrace, while only one series continued on to the higher terraces. It is
also possible that the aqueduct illustrated in the British Museum’s Nineveh
relief and alluded to by Philo the Paradoxographer brought water in high
enough that only the top few terraces had to be irrigated by lifted water.
Given the absence of specific details about the gardens, however, it is
impossible to provide detailed statistics of need or potential discharge.
It should be emphasized that if the object cast by Sennacherib was a
water screw, it could not have represented the first use of that mechanism
for raising water. There must have been working examples in wood that
inspired or were copied for the bronze casting, since nobody would cast
such a device full-scale in bronze unless he already knew it would work. Just
as the sophistication of the Antikythera cog mechanism (by far the earliest
material evidence for gearing) was part of a long period of technical evolution
largely hidden from us, so the manufacture of Sennacherib’s screw in
expensive and intractable bronze was presumably the result of considerable
previous experience and practical use.46 Since wood rarely survives in
Mesopotamia, we are unlikely ever to find wooden water screws there.
In summary, the details of the Palace without a Rival inscription as
reinterpreted by Dalley remain the principal pre-Hellenistic evidence for
the existence of the water screw. This interpretation is supported by
Strabo’s description of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon only if one attributes
the gardens to Sennacherib at Nineveh rather than to another king in
Babylon and accepts the antiquity of Strabo’s sources. The same provisos
affect interpretation of the passage in Philo the Paradoxographer.
If the screw was invented or adopted by the Assyrians in the seventh
century B.C., they would likely have introduced it into Egypt when they
took control of the Nile Valley in the mid-seventh century, where Archimedes
might have seen it at work four centuries later. A passage in Deuteronomy
(11:10), probably dating to the seventh century B.C., mentions
that in Egypt, unlike Palestine, men watered their gardens “with their feet.”
The phrase may refer to the shovel work necessary for impounding and
47. Although few scholars would allow a date as late as the third century B.C. for this
text, a late date cannot be ruled out, so the evidence it provides is not conclusive.Oleson,
Mechanical Water-Lifting (n. 1 above), 98–99, dates it to the seventh century B.C. and suggests
that the text might in fact refer to the shaduf or the compartmented wheel.
48. Jaromír Málek, Egyptian Art (London, 1999), 368.
49. For discussions of the Greco-Roman water screw, see Oleson, Mechanical Water-
Lifting, 291–301, and “Water-Lifting” (n. 1 above), 242–51. Archimedes’ treatise on spirals
is discussed by Wilbur R. Knorr, “Archimedes and the Spirals: The Heuristic Background,”
History of Mathematics 5 (1978): 43–75. The design of the hypothetical wooden
water screws that might have preceded Sennacherib’s palace design, of course, is completely
unknown. The related principle of threaded bolt and nut was known by the third
century B.C., but practical application seems to have come only in the first century B.C.
Because of the difficulty of cutting accurate threads, small metal bolts were rare even in
the Roman period, seen most often in jewelry and luxury metal objects. The threaded
bolt and nut were most commonly manufactured on a very large scale in wood, for use
in grape, olive, or clothes presses. The metal carpenter’s screw for wood was unknown in
antiquity. See Franz Kiechle, “Zur Verwendung der Schraube in der Antike,”Technikgeschichte
34 (1967): 14–22; Aage G. Drachmann, “Heron’s Screwcutter,” Journal of
Hellenic Studies 56 (1936): 72–77; Rudolf Kellermann and Wilhelm Treue, Die Kulturgeschichte
der Schraube, 2nd ed. (Munich, 1962); Barbara Deppert-Lippitz et al., Die
Schraube zwischen Macht und Pracht: Das Gewinde in der Antike (Sigmaringen, Ger.,
1995).
DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw
17
channeling irrigation water in the Nile Valley, or it may simply be a metaphor
for hard labor. But if the phrase is to be interpreted literally, the only
appropriate irrigation devices would be the water screw or the wheel with
compartmented rim, and for the latter there is no evidence earlier than the
third century B.C.47 One might expect Egyptian paintings to show screws in
action in the Nile Delta during the Persian or early Ptolemaic periods if
they existed then, but by that time the vogue for landscape art, so popular
in the Late Bronze Age period of the New Kingdom, had passed.48 One can
only hope that more evidence will come to light in the future.
Did Archimedes Invent the Water Screw?
Is the case for Archimedes as the inventor—or even the reinventor—of
the water screw any stronger than that for Sennacherib? Without doubt
Archimedes wrote a mathematical treatise on spirals, for which the main
application known at that time was the water-lifting screw. The question is,
was he responsible also for the mechanical invention?49 And even if we cannot
verify that he invented (or reinvented) the device, what was the context
that spawned the innovation? The design of the everyday Greek and Roman
water screw, in contrast to the heavy bronze device of Sennacherib, with its
problematic drive chains, has a powerful simplicity. A double or triple helix
was built of wood strips (or occasionally bronze sheeting) around a heavy
wooden pole. A cylinder was built around the helices using long, narrow
boards fastened to their periphery and waterproofed with pitch, and treadT
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ing cleats were fastened around the outside of the barrel, toward the center
(figs. 4 and 5). Screws of this type, which might be 2 meters to 3 meters
long, turned on simple metal pivots at each end of the axle. All surviving
representations of the water screw in action show a single individual standing
on the treads to work the screw, which is set at a low angle, and the literary
texts describe only treading. The treader balanced and partly supported
himself on a pole stuck in the earth nearby or on a horizontal beam
supported by a thatched sun shelter, and moved the treads with his feet.
There is a fresco representation of an agricultural water screw in the House
of Menander at Pompeii (fig. 4), and Philo Judaeus provides a clear description
of such a water screw action in the first century A.D. (De confusione linguarum
38):
Compare the screw, the water-lifting device. There are some treads
around the middle on which the husbandman steps whenever he
wants to irrigate his fields, but naturally he keeps slipping off. To keep
from continually falling, he grasps something sturdy nearby with his
hands and clings to it, suspending his whole body from it. In this way
he uses his hands as feet and his feet as hands, for he supports himself
FIG. 4 Pompeii, House of Menander, fresco of Egyptian water screw in operation.
(Photo by John Peter Oleson.)
50. Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, vol. 2, pt. A (Leiden,
DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw
19
with his hands, which are generally used for working, and he works
with his feet, which customarily serve as supports.
For a high angle of installation, such as might be needed for draining deep
mines or lifting water up a steep slope, a different method of rotation may
have been used, but no descriptions or representations of a screw at such an
angle exist to show how this might have been done.
All the surviving archaeological evidence for the water screw dates to
the first century A.D. or later, and the few possible papyrological references
belong to the first and second centuries A.D. Greek literary sources, however,
begin in the second half of the third century B.C. Vitruvius (On Architecture
10.6.1–4) provides the best ancient description of the water screw,
and complete instructions on how to construct it.After adapting the design
to reduce the number of helices to two, the procedures outlined by Vitruvius
were followed without difficulty during design and construction of
two full-size water screws for the BBC television production (fig. 5).
Diodorus of Sicily associates the water screw with Archimedes in a passage
concerned with irrigation in the Nile Delta (History 1.34.2): “[T]he Nile
. . . in its annual inundation always deposits new mud, and the inhabitants
easily irrigate the whole region by means of a certain device which
Archimedes the Syracusan invented [ejpenovhse], called the screw [kocliva~]
on account of its design.”50 Here we meet a crux of interpretation which is
FIG. 5 The BBC water screw, complete and mounted. (Photo by John Peter
Oleson.)
1961), 213, no. 86, frag. 19, attributes this passage to an unknown work by Agatharchides
of Cnidus, who wrote in the third quarter of the second century B.C.
51. Ibid., 309, no. 87, frag. 117. The passage probably originated in an unknown
work by Posidonius of Apamaea written in the first half of the first century B.C.
52. Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting, 92–93.
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applicable also to other passages discussed below. Common meanings of the
verb ejpinoei`n include to think about, to think of, contrive, purpose, observe,
invent. It can be seen that one might substitute “observed” or “found” for
“invented” without disturbing the narrative or the syntax significantly.
A second passage in Diodorus (History 5.37.3–4), probably quoted
from the first-century B.C. author Posidonius, contains two cruxes.51 Not
only can the verb euJrivskw be ambiguous, allowing the meanings to find,
find out, discover, invent, get, gain, and earn, but tecnivth~, “craftsman,”
might be either a direct reference to Archimedes or a generic term for the
inventive human being. The passage describes the working of mines in
Spain:
At a depth they sometimes break in on rivers flowing beneath the surface
whose strength they overcome by diverting their welling tributaries
off to the side in channels. Since they are driven by the wellfounded
anticipation of gain, they carry out their enterprises to the
end, and—most incredible of all—they draw off the streams of water
with the so-called Egyptian screw [Aijguptiakoi; koclivai], which
Archimedes the Syracusan invented [eu|ren] when he visited Egypt.
By means of these devices, set up in an unbroken series up to the
mouth of the mine, they dry up the mining area and provide a suitable
environment for carrying out their work. Since this device is
quite ingenious, a prodigious amount of water is discharged with
only a small amount of labor, and the whole torrent is easily discharged
from the depths into the light of day. One might reasonably
marvel at the inventiveness of the craftsman [Archimedes?] not only
in this, but also in many other even greater inventions celebrated
throughout the whole world, each of which we shall discuss carefully
in turn when we come to the age of Archimedes.
The translation of eu|ren as “invented” in this passage finds support in
the use by Diodorus of the same verb to record the invention of siege
engines by Dionysius of Syracuse’s think tank, in a passage quoted above. It
is also possible to find support in the famous story of Archimedes’ discovery
of the principle of specific gravity while floating in a basin at a public
bath in Syracuse (Plutarch Moralia 1094C): He leaped out of the tub in his
excitement, crying eu|rhka (also from euJrivskw), “I’ve found it!” (the solution
to the problem confronting him, that is), and ran home naked through
the streets.52 But should account be taken of the essential difference
53. For example, Dijksterhuis (n. 6 above), 21–22; Brian Cotterell and Johan
Kamminga, Mechanics of Pre-Industrial Technology (Cambridge, 1990), 94; and doubts
expressed by Morris R. Cohen and Israel E. Drabkin, A Sourcebook in Greek Science
(Cambridge, Mass., 1948), 350–51. Contrary arguments are collected in Oleson,
Mechanical Water-Lifting (n. 1 above), 291–94. Danielle Bonneau, Le Regime administratif
de l’eau du Nil dans l’Egypt grecque, romaine, et Byzantine (Leiden, 1993), 97–98,
accepts Archimedes as the inventor.
54. See Lewis, “The Hellenistic Period” (n. 5 above), 635.
DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw
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between discovering a preexisting law and inventing a new mechanical
device? Archimedes cannot be said literally to have invented the principle
of displacement. Thus the verb in Plutarch may mean to come across, discover,
rather than to devise first, to originate (in the sense known to patent
law), and some scholars interpret it in this way.53 According to this interpretation,
preexistence of the water screw would also explain why Posidonius
(in Diodorus Siculus) calls them “Egyptian screws” here and in a similar
fragment quoted in Strabo Geography 3.2.9.
On the other hand, one also can interpret eu|ren in the passage from
Posidonius to indicate that—as with the discovery of specific gravity—
Archimedes observed the principles of spirals and helices in nature and
applied his analysis of natural phenomena to the solution of a human engineering
problem. This seems to have been Vitruvius’s understanding, since
in his version of the story Archimedes “cried out in a loud voice that he had
found what he was seeking” (On Architecture 9, preface 9–10, “significabat
clara voce invenisse, quod quaereret”).Vitruvius lists Archimedes among the
superior innovators who based their practical inventions on mathematics
and natural laws (On Architecture 1.1.17): “Archimedes and Scopinas of
Syracuse. They have left to posterity many treatises on machinery and timekeeping
devices in which mathematics and natural law are used to make
discoveries and explain them.” Unfortunately, the verb is too common and
the contexts in which it is used are too fluid to allow the modern reader precise
semantic distinctions.
Finally, mention must be made of Plutarch’s description (Marcellus
14.4–9) of how mechanics was a subject entirely distinct from geometry,
and how King Hiero of Syracuse had trouble persuading Archimedes “to
turn his art somewhat from abstract notions to material things.” This comment
is unique and probably represents rhetorical posturing, but it is interesting
to note that Plutarch reports Hiero’s motivation to have been “prestige,”
like that of the contemporary Ptolemies, who subsidized applied
research in Alexandria.54 In this context he calls Archimedes dhmiourgov~
(14.9), a term for “craftsman”with more mythical overtones than that used
by Posidonius.
Another passage which can be interpreted to show that Archimedes
invented the water screw is quoted by Athenaeus (Philosophers at Dinner
5.207–208) from Moschion’s Treatise on the Great Ship of Hiero of Syracuse,
55. Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, vol. 3, pt. B (Leiden,
1964), 677, no. 575, frag 5.3.
56. Compare, in particular, Aeschylus Prometheus Bound 460, 469 (to invent mathematics,
writing, and inventions); Herodotus History 1.8 (to invent rules); Plato Republic
566b (to devise a petition).
57. Landels (n. 45 above), 66, is probably correct that a single water screw could not
have provided enough lift to pump out Hiero’s large (and thus deep-hulled) ship. For a
full discussion of the ship, see Jean M. Turfa and Alwin G. Steinmayer, “The Syracusia as
a Giant Cargo Vessel,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 28 (1999): 105–25.
On bilge pumps, see Oleson, “Water-Lifting” (n. 1 above), 263–67, 298–99.
58. See Peter Kingsley, “Artillery and Prophecy: Sicily in the Reign of Dionysius I,”
Prometheus 21 (1995): 15–23.
59. On the special character of the technological climate in Hellenistic Alexandria,
see Lewis, “The Hellenistic Period.”
60. In the twelfth century, Eustathius (ad Iliadem M 293) also attributes the invention
of the water screw to Archimedes, but—despite his deep classical learning—his testimony
is too late to carry any particular weight.
61. Dijksterhuis (n. 6 above), 21–22.
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written sometime soon after 241 B.C.55 “And the bilge, although of a
remarkable depth, was pumped out by a single man operating a water
screw [dia; koclivou], which Archimedes invented [ejxeurovnto~].” The verb
used here, ejxeurivskein, has a range of meaning: invent, discover, find out.56
Although the water screw is not well adapted to bilge pumping and was
soon replaced for this purpose by chain pumps and force pumps,Moschion
may have had information either that Archimedes invented the water screw
and then put it to use in this highly experimental ship, or that Archimedes
found the screw in Egypt and introduced it to the people of Syracuse,
inventing a new use for it.57 According to the long, detailed text quoted in
Athenaeus, Archimedes was the technical overseer (gewmevtrh~ ejpovpth~)
of the whole project (Philosophers at Dinner 5.206d).58
Oleson believes that the fragments of Moschion, Agatharchides, and
Posidonius (as quoted in Athenaeus and Diodorus Siculus) can be interpreted
to indicate either that Archimedes invented the water screw or that
during or soon after his lifetime and in the course of the second century B.C.
individuals familiar with his life and work believed that he had invented a
new device called the water screw. In either case, the chronology suggests
that the device was invented around the time of Archimedes, in the particularly
fertile climate of practical innovation associated with the Museion,
the Museum at Alexandria.59 Dalley interprets the evidence to show that he
was associated with the screw only because of his treatise on spirals, his
observation of preexisting screws in use in Egypt, and his adaptation of the
device for Hiero’s ships.60 Dijksterhuis is another scholar who believes that
Archimedes found the water screw already in use when he visited Egypt,
arguing that “neither Strabo, nor Philo of Byzantium [sic], nor Vitruvius,
who all three mention or describe [the water screw], associate it with the
name of Archimedes.”61 These objections are groundless, since it is clear
62. See n. 29 above.
63. Herbert Addison carried out experiments with a reconstructed water screw
showing, among other results, that the capacity of the water screw is greatest at lower lifts
and falls off very rapidly as the angle of inclination approaches the complement of the
angle of the vanes; “Experiments on an Archimedean Screw,” Institution of Civil
Engineers 75 (1929): 3–15. There is a more sophisticated mathematical model in Chris
Rorres, “The Turn of the Screw: Optimal Design of an Archimedes Screw,” Journal of
Hydraulic Engineering 126, no. 1 (2000): 72–80.
64. For example, the fresco of an Egyptian water-screw installation at Pompeii; see
Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting, 241–42, and “Water-Lifting,” 247–49 (both n. 1 above).
65. Oleson, Mechanical Water-Lifting, 207–9, 227, 241–42.
DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw
23
from the context that by “Philo of Byzantium” Dijksterhuis intended Philo
Judaeus of Alexandria, whose description of a screw in action (quoted
above) in fact does not mention Archimedes.62
The absence of Archimedes’ name from some of the texts that mention
the water screw is certainly not conclusive. For comparison, Ctesibius’s
works have been lost, but descriptions of gadgets and hydraulic devices
specifically attributed to him have been preserved in the works of Philo of
Byzantium, Vitruvius, and Hero of Alexandria. Ctesibius’s name is associated
in particular with the piston-operated force pump, called Ctesibica
machina by Vitruvius (On Architecture 10.7.1). In the mid-first century A.D.,
however, Hero describes the same force pump in detail but calls it only a
sivfwn, omitting any reference to the inventor. A parallel could be drawn
with instances where Archimedes’ water screw is termed only “Egyptian
screw” or simply “screw.” In the passages of his Geography which mention
the water screw, Strabo is concerned with the design of the Hanging Gardens
of Babylon (16.1.5), the location of the Roman fort at Old Cairo (17.1.3),
and the means of watering the many islands in the Nile river (17.1.52).
There is no reason to mention Archimedes in any of these contexts.
Whether the screw was introduced into the Nile Delta by Archimedes
on behalf of Ptolemy II or arrived four centuries earlier under Assyrian
occupation, the device was ideally suited to that environment. The water
screw is particularly effective for low lifts, such as irrigation along the lowlying
banks of the Nile Delta. In addition, the device is essentially self-purging
and can lift water that is thick with silt and vegetable matter. There are
no small intake holes or compartments to clog, the water simply flows
unrestricted over smooth-walled surfaces.63 A passage in Strabo (Geography
17.1.52) describes this situation: “There are a great many islands scattered
along the course of the Nile. Some are completely covered during the flood,
others only in part, and the particularly high spots are irrigated with water
screws [koclivai~].”
The water screw remained a typical image of the Egyptian landscape in
literature and art through the Roman period.64 Numerous terra-cotta
reliefs and one fresco representing water-screw installations at work have
survived from the Roman imperial period, along with one model.65 None
66.O¨ rjan Wikander, Exploitation ofWater-Power or Technological Stagnation?(Lund,
1984), discusses the lack of chronological overlap between archaeological and literary
evidence for the existence of mechanical devices in classical antiquity.
67. Girolamo Cardano, De subtilitate (Basel, 1554), quoted in E. M. P. Evans,
“Ancient Mining,” Antiquity 17 (1943): 52. The craftsman is described as a faber ferrarius.
Thomas Ewbank, A Descriptive and Historical Account of Hydraulic and Other
Machines for Raising Water (London, 1842), 139.
68. For example, Agostino Ramelli, Le diverse e artificiose machine del capitano
Agostino Ramelli (Paris, 1588), which contains several devices utilizing the water screw.
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of this evidence coincides with the period of Archimedes and his immediate
successors, showing the incompleteness of the pictorial record.66 There
are, of course, no representations of water screws that predate Archimedes.
One possible explanation for the absence of any evidence of the existence
of the water screw between the examples Dalley reconstructs for Sennacherib’s
garden and those embedded in the literary sources for Archimedes’
career is that the device fell out of use, was forgotten, and was reinvented by
Archimedes or a near contemporary. Although the water screw has in fact
never fallen out of use since Archimedes, it has allegedly been reinvented
several times. The sixteenth-century Italian polymath Girolamo Cardano
says he had heard of a blacksmith in Milan who thought he was the first to
invent this device and went insane from joy. The nineteenth-century engineer
Thomas Ewbank reports that he, too, as a boy heard of a shoemaker
who had suffered the same delusion.67 If these stories are true, it may be significant
that both these individuals were workmen who—in addition to
never having been exposed to a water screw in operation—presumably did
not have access to the classical authors or the numerous books on applied
technology already available in the sixteenth century.68 Whether true or
not, the stories arose in environments not dissimilar to that of Hellenistic
Alexandria.
Conclusions
What can we conclude from all this? The chronology of the first discovery
of the water screw is still clouded in uncertainty. Sennacherib was interested
in the problems of water supply, and he constructed some sort of
clever or spectacular device to assist the irrigation of his gardens at Nineveh.
The Palace without a Rival inscription applies metaphorical terminology
that an Assyriologist with a knowledge of the water screw can argue refers to
that device.We know that the water screw existed by at least the mid-third
century B.C., since literary sources describe it in explicit terms. It seems likely
that Archimedes invented (or reinvented) the device in Egypt at the request
of one of the Ptolemies to solve irrigation problems in the Nile Delta, but
this conclusion is not certain. The design of the water screw can be interpreted
as either an offshoot of Archimedes’ research into the mathematics of
69. Knorr (n. 49 above).
70. See, for example, Athenaeus Philosophers at Dinner 5.198e–f, and, in Athens, a
mechanical snail that left a trail of slime: Polybius History 12.13.11. There is a popular
discussion of this phenomenon in Robert S. Brumbaugh, Ancient Greek Gadgets and
Machines (New York, 1966).
DALLEY and OLESONK|KSennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw
25
spirals or the very inspiration for that research.69 If the water screw did, in
fact, exist in Mesopotamia early in the seventh century B.C., what is particularly
interesting is the observation that it seems either to have fallen out of
use completely or to have been so completely divorced from the realities of
urban society in Mesopotamia and Egypt that Archimedes could be awarded
credit for its invention or rediscovery almost five hundred years later.
If the water screw had such a negligible impact on the cultures of the
eastern Mediterranean before the time of Archimedes, the actual date of its
original invention is of little importance. But the similarity of the conditions
in seventh-century Nineveh and third-century Alexandria that might
have led to its discovery is striking. Both cultures depended completely on
exogenous river systems to supply water for irrigating their rich, alluvial
soils, and on technologies and regulations that facilitated irrigation agriculture.
Both were ruled by royal houses interested as much in broadcasting
the prestige and imagery of technological success, the tangible evidence
of human triumph over the forces of nature, as in the practical results. Sennacherib
conquered the river, forcing it to serve humankind, and commemorated
the results in public reliefs and inscriptions. He also constructed
his show garden for his queen, to heal her homesick memories for
the verdant mountain slopes of her native land, and he irrigated the artificial
mountainside conspicuously with conduits and some water-lifting
device, commemorating it in the same manner as what seem to us his more
practical accomplishments. The pharaohs boasted of their control of the
Nile in a similar manner. Their technological heirs, the Ptolemies, made
astute practical use of the water screws, catapults, and giant ships designed
by their court scientists, but they delighted as well in the banquet table gadgetry
designed by Ctesibius and in automated parade floats that paraded
such cleverness to the public.70
One significant difference, however, sets the Ptolemaic response apart.
In the premodern period, specific, individual, nonmythical inventors are
only rarely given credit for their efforts and insight, but at Alexandria and
(to a lesser extent) Syracuse in the mid-third century there was a brief historical
moment in which individual genius was recorded. If one of Sennacherib’s
engineers found the water screw in use along an irrigation canal, or
dreamed up the device on the basis of an understanding of natural and
man-made spiraling forms, the credit belonged to his absolute ruler. Archimedes,
in contrast, was given personal credit for the water screw, which
grew out of his personal intellectual interests, and for many other devices
constructed for his patrons there and in Syracuse. Before him in Alexandria,
71. Innovation, in fact, could be perilous, as an “urban myth” circulated in Rome in
the first century A.D. emphasizes. An anonymous craftsman supposedly invented “flexible”
or “unbreakable” glass, and he showed a specimen to the emperor Tiberius (14–37
A.D.) in the hope of a great reward. After determining that no one else knew the secret,
Tiberius had him killed in the fear that the invention would ruin the bullion-based economy.
The story is preserved in a number of first-century texts: Petronius Satyricon 50–51;
Pliny Natural History 36.195; Dio Cassius History 57.21.6.
72. On the Museion and its scientists, see Eduard Müller-Graupa, “Museion,”
Realencyclopadie vol. 16, no. 1 (1933), 797–821; Lewis, “The Hellenistic Period” (n. 5
above), 632–35; Michael J. T. Lewis, “Theoretical Hydraulics, Automata, and Water
Clocks,” in Wikander, Handbook of Ancient Water Technology (n. 1 above), 343–69.
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Ctesibius and Philo of Byzantium benefited from the same sort of celebrity.
In contrast, the members of the think tank that worked for Dionysius of
Syracuse 150 years previously remain anonymous, as do nearly all the innovative
engineers and architects who transformed the Mediterranean world
during the Roman empire.71 The question of why individual technicians
remained associated with their innovations in mid-third century B.C. Alexandria
and Syracuse cannot be answered here, but the presence of the
Museion, a well-funded, more or less independent research institute in
Alexandria, undoubtedly played an important part, along with the welldocumented
rivalry of King Hiero II of Syracuse with Ptolemy II, Ptolemy
III, and Ptolemy IV.72 The very fact of the potential recognition of individual
effort and accomplishment may also have been a trigger for innovation.
But this florescence was brief, and the attitudes and structures typical of the
ancient world had to fall away before an individual such as Leonardo da
Vinci could once again derive personal fame from his inventions.
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