The water mill, the first energy source to replace muscle power, appears in the Hellenistic cultural sphere at the end of the 2nd or beginning of the 1st century BC. The region of origin of this important invention, somewhere in Asia, is not well known. The first traces are claimed to be from the kingdom of Pontus, at Cabeira, by Strabo (who is a native of that region), in the proximity of the new palace of Mithridatus VII Eupator, king of Pontus from 111 to 63 BC. He fought against the Roman expansion in the region, but was finally defeated by Pompey in 63 BC.
“… at their junction (i. e. of the two rivers Lycos and Iris) is situated a city which the first man who subjugated it called Eupatoria after his own name, but Pompey found it only half-finished and added to it territory and settlers, and called it Magnopolis. Now this city is situated in the middle of the plain, but Cabeira is situated close to the very foothills of the Paryadres mountains about one hundred and fifty stadia farther south than Magnopolis, the same distance that Amaseia^1 is farther west than Magnopolis. It was at Cabeira that the palace of
Mithridates was built, and also the water-mill; and here were the zoological gardens, and, near
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by, the hunting grounds, and the mines.”
Another piece of written evidence, essentially from the same time as the text of Strabo, is attributed to Antipatros of Thessaly. It speaks poetically of the new pleasures to be enjoyed by the miller, liberated by hydraulics from the need to turn the mill with his own muscles. It also suggests that this is a recent invention:
“Women who toil at the querns, cease now your grinding;
Sleep late though the crowing of cocks announces the dawn.
Your task is now for the nymphs, by command of Demeter,
And leaping down on the top of the wheel, they turn it,
Axle and whirling spokes together revolving and causing The heavy and hollow Nisyrian stones to grind above.
So shall we taste the joys of the golden age
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And feast on Demeter’s gift without ransom of labour.”-”
Some see in this sentence the proof that the mill to which the text refers (the one at Mithridatus? Another mill?) has a vertical axis and horizontal wheel (the Nymphs turn the axle in bounding to the top of the wheel). But this would appear to be thin proof at best. It is only under the Roman Empire, and in particular during the 1st and 2nd cen — [192] [193] [194] [195] turies AD, that the use of the water mill spreads into the Roman provinces of Asia and the West. We will return to this in more detail in Chapter 6. Note that in China we find hydraulic energy applied to complex industrial uses as early as the 1st century AD, (Chapter 8).
