Ancient Technology
Ancient Technology
Trial and Error. The early Greek contributions in technology are few and hard to determine. Most of the basic technological innovations enjoyed by the early Greeks came to them secondhand, from even older cultures in which they had evolved through long, unrecorded ages of trial and error. The fundamental Western methods and tools of agriculture, irrigation, viticulture (wine-making), animal husbandry, metallurgy, mining, transport, navigation, textile manufacture, pottery, and building all have histories that stretch far back into the third and fourth millennia b.c.e. They belong to discoveries and developments made in the far more ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.
Beneficiaries. The Greeks of the Archaic and Classical Periods were the beneficiaries of this development. They took up techniques that had passed anonymously down through other cultures and earlier generations. They used, adapted, extended, and refined them. And in most cases they just as anonymously handed them down to those who came after. The most noteworthy Greek innovations in technology—especially in mechanics and hydraulics—occurred only later, during the Hellenistic Period, from roughly the third through the first centuries b.c.e.
Architecture. At the same time, of course, the ancient Greeks relied on a great variety of skills to make their world habitable. The construction of buildings—especially the temples whose remains still mark the modern Greek landscape—required sophisticated architectural design and a
mastery of engineering techniques. Blocks of marble and other kinds of stone needed first to be mined and quarried, then cut to shape, transported long distances by both land and sea, and finally erected on-site through the use of ramps, pulleys, cranes, and winches. Several developments, all impossible to credit to a single individual, arose in the slow process of improving ancient techniques. By the mid fifth century b.c.e., for instance, archaeology reveals that iron bars were used (apparently for the first time) to reinforce wood and stone structures.
Herodotus. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus recorded some of the technological marvels of his day. In the year 512 b.c.e., a Greek engineer named Mandrocles reportedly constructed a bridge of boats across the Bosphorus (the strait of water separating Europe from Asia near the modern city of Istanbul, Turkey). The bridge enabled the great Persian emperor, Darius, to cross his army into Europe and wage war against the Greeks.
HOW TO MAKE A RAFT
With a high degree of technological skill—and a little divine help—the hero Odysseus constructed the raft on which he escaped from the island of Ogygia.
He chopped down twenty [trees] in all, and trimmed them well with his bronze ax, planed them expertly, trued them straight to a chalklme.
Kalypso, the shining goddess, at that time came back, bringing him an auger, and he bored through them all and pinned them together with dowels, and then with cords he lashed his raft together...
Next, setting up the deck boards and fitting them to close uprights he worked them on, and closed in the ends with broad gunwales.
Then he fashioned the mast, with an upper deck fitted to it, and made in addition a steering oar by which to direct it, and fenced it down the whole length with wattles of osier to keep the water out…
Next Kalypso, the shining goddess, brought out the sail cloth to make the sails with, and he carefully worked these also, and attached the straps and halyards and sheets in place aboard it, and then with levers worked it down to the bright salt water.
Source: The Odyssey of Homer, translated by Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper & Row, 1967)
Three Marvels. Herodotus also mentioned what he considered “three of the greatest engineering feats in the Greek world.” The first was a tunnel, eight feet by eight feet and nearly one mile long, cut through a mountain on the island of Samos, in order to conduct water from one side of the island to the other. He credits this construction to the engineer Eupalinus. The second was an artificial harbor on the same island, enclosed by a breakwater running nearly one quarter of a mile into the sea. The third
“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions” was the Samian temple to the goddess Hera, built around 500 b.c.e. and the largest such structure in all of Greece.
Ships. Given how large a role the sea played in ancient Greek life, the construction of ships, both for transport and warfare, was likewise a central activity. The poet Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey, takes place in a world in which Greeks and others regularly navigate the Aegean and Mediterranean seas in ships of all different types. During Classical times, the state-of-the-art warship was the trireme. It was developed during the sixth century and set the standard for light, relatively fast attack ships. It was a narrow vessel roughly 120 feet in length and 20 feet wide, and manned by a crew of about two hundred men. In open water it relied on a large, square sail. In battle, the mast was lowered and the ship propelled by banks of rowers at an average speed of around five knots. The name trireme means “three-oared” and probably refers to the placement of the rowers in three separate tiers. The prow of the trireme was extended just below the waterline by a long, curved “beak” of wood covered with bronze, making the ship an extremely effective weapon for ramming.
Slave Society. In certain respects, however, the ancient Greek world remained what can be called pretechnological. Practical innovations—the construction of machines, for instance—always lagged far behind abstract and conceptual ones. This situation was due first and in large part to the fact that ancient Greece was a slave society. It has been estimated that, in a representative city on the Greek mainland, as much as one-third to one-half of the total population consisted of slaves. They were mostly captives taken in war or the children bred from them, and their misery is often overlooked or forgotten when we think of the remarkable achievements of the Greeks. For Aristotle, in fact, a slave had the status of a “human tool,” whose availability made the need to develop other tools less pressing. Necessity is certainly the mother of invention. The abundant supply of cheap manual labor in the ancient world tended to reduce the need for technological innovations.
Narrow-Mindedness. Another factor that retarded Greek technology was a cultural or ideological one. The minority of Greeks who were educated enough to be concerned with scientific and technological problems were generally less interested in practical issues than in abstract, theoretical ones. Practical solutions, like manual labor, were considered matters for the lower class.
Sources
Donald Cardwell, The Norton History of Technology (New York: Norton, 1994).
John G. Landels, Engineering in the Ancient World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
George Sarton, A History of Science, volume 1: Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952).