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Roman Aqueducts Essay

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Ancient Roman aqueducts are some of the most impressive architectural remnants of the once dominant Roman Empire. The technological advances that were made around the first century AD by both the Greeks and Romans in the areas of architecture, construction, and design, were cutting edge to say the very least. There were also quite clearly abundant practical applications for the Roman aqueducts in Rome, Italy. Even as Rome’s population exceeded 1 million people around the year 120 AD, the aqueducts capably and efficiently supplied clean and potable drinking water not only to Rome itself, but also to a number of the large cities and small towns in the Empire, and other points of interest including mines and significant work sites. The history …show more content…

While the builders wanted to make sure that certain stretches of the Roman aqueducts in Rome were above ground to display their innovative and inspiring designs, building aqueducts underground also had its practical advantages, not the least of which was keeping the water clean and free from disease and bacteria. The history of Roman aqueducts is important to understand in order to truly grasp the way in which Rome was organized. Citizenship in the Roman Empire meant the advantages of advantages such as ready access to potable drinking water, certainly not something that could be said for many other, if any, places in the world at this point in history. There were eleven major ancient Roman aqueducts that were constructed over the course of 500 …show more content…

This volume highlights both the accomplishments of the ancient societies and the remaining research problems, and stimulates further progress in the history of ancient technology. The subject matter of the book is the technological framework of the Greek and Roman cultures from ca. 800 B.C. through ca. A.D. 500 in the circum-Mediterranean world and Northern Europe. Each chapter discusses a technology or family of technologies from an analytical rather than descriptive point of view, providing a critical summation of our present knowledge of the Greek and Roman accomplishments in the technology concerned and the evolution of their technical capabilities over the chronological period. Each presentation reviews the issues and recent contributions, and defines the capacities and accomplishments of the technology in the context of the society that used it, the available "technological shelf," and the resources consumed. These studies introduce and synthesize the results of excavation or specialized studies. The chapters are organized in sections progressing from sources (written and representational) to primary (e.g., mining, metallurgy, agriculture) and secondary (e.g., woodworking, glass production, food preparation, textile production and leather-working) production, to technologies of social

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