Water is the key to all civilization. The diverse and often competing uses of water inevitably lead to tensions and conflicts in its management and allocation. Water technology has progressed from the primitive to the advanced, but this progress has not changed man’s continuous responsibility for careful and fair management of this precious resource.
Initially, my objective was to give my students at l’Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees a historical perspective before getting into the craft of the engineer and modern techniques for flow modeling. But as I tried to travel back in time to reconstruct the historical relations between mankind and water, I quickly realized what a distant horizon this quest represented. The wealth of knowledge to be mined from the past quickly became apparent — not only in the descriptions of hydraulic works and analysis techniques developed by our distant ancestors, but also in the relation between the development of hydraulics and of civilization itself. It seems to me that it is as important to understand the context and circumstances of innovations, and their entry into the knowledge base of civilization, as it is to describe the innovations themselves.
This book does not pretend to be a comprehensive catalog of hydraulic works. I have tried to be reasonably complete, while limiting the scope of my studies to the vast and continuous landmass extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the China Sea. My historical perspective extends in time from the ancient Near East, to Antiquity (the historic period preceding the Middle Ages in Europe), and then to the medieval world; from the known origins of Neolithic water management, up until the Renaissance and the advent of modern fluid mechanics. One could legitimately criticize this work for having ignored certain civilizations, for example the pre-Columbian world in the Americas. But the objective of the book — to describe ancient works and processes and situate them in the melding of the East and the West in a unified manner — led me to limit my attention to the Eastern hemisphere.
To give the reader a feel — a bit of taste and smell — of the ancient civilizations, I liberally include citations from ancient authors themselves — scribes and chroniclers, travelers such as Xenophon and Ibn Battuta, historians such as Herodotus and Sima Qian, geographers or architects like Strabo and Vitruvius. I make an effort to complement the text with numerous maps, plans, and sketches, for nothing is more annoying than to read the description of a site without being able to see where it is.
This work is presented in two parts. The first covers the period prior to the 3rd century BC. It deals with the land bounded by Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Aegean Sea, where the stage was set for the meeting of the geometry of the Greeks and the hydraulic know-how of the East at Alexandria and elsewhere. The second part begins with the hydrostatics of Archimedes and the earliest devices based on the use of water pressure. This part of the book broadens the perspective to include the main developments of the Roman, Chinese, and Arab empires, and finally, those of the medieval world. This perspective does not necessarily lead to a strictly chronological presentation of the material; the chronological table at the end of the book serves this purpose for the interested reader.
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