their civilization: According to Greek myth, under Minos’s palace at Knossos lay a labyrinth inhabited by a sacrificial-maiden-devouring Minotaur, the monstrous offspring of Minos’s wife and a bull sent by the sea god Poseidon that ultimately was slain by the Greek hero Theseus.
mariners from Miletus: Cary and Warmington, 37.
manifestation of water: Jones, History of Western Philosophy, 32–34.
trireme lay low: Casson, 85.
great cajoling: To entice Xerxes—as well as to prevent his vacillating allies from changing their minds at the last moment—Themistocles devised one of history’s most famous deceptions. Pretending to turn traitor, he sent an informant to Xerxes’ headquarters with the credible news that the Greeks were preparing to slip away and disperse rather than fight a single big battle against long numerical odds. Xerxes took the bait. He ordered his patrols to row all night to prevent a Greek breakout.
“they gathered the grass”: Herodotus, Persian Wars, 642–643.
asymmetrical advantages: Athens’s surrounding seas and rugged landscape provided a further defensive buffer against land armies—a distinguishing advantage lacked by both Phoenicia and Miletus.
more representative: Athens’s laws and magistrates were decided by a majority vote of the citizens’ assembly, normally in accordance with a representative advisory council. In time voting rights were extended to the poor as the growing wealth of the state came to depend on the large naval manpower needed to pull the galley oars. Even naval commanders, such as Themistocles, were elected by popular vote.
Alexander turned it into an opportunity: Cary and Worthington, 179–180; Foreman, 188–189.
700,000 items: Daniel J. Wakin, “Successor to Ancient Alexandria Library Dedicated,” New York Times, October 17, 2002. Government officials boarded ships in Alexandria’s harbor, seized whatever scrolls were on board, and then had them copied. The originals were returned to their owners; the copies were added to the library’s collection.
body lay in state: After his death Alexander’s body had been intercepted en route from Babylon to its final resting place in Macedon by Ptolemy I, his trusted general and boyhood friend, to bolster the legitimacy of the Egyptian dynasty he founded and which would rule Egypt until Rome incorporated the country, and its agricultural bounty, into its empire. The site of Alexander’s tomb was lost in the riots of the third century AD.
76–77. consolidated slowly: Rome’s expansion progressed slowly through military victories, regional political alliances, and the granting of citizenship to absorbed Italic tribes; plebeian classes that served in the army gradually gained greater political representation in government.
100 quinqueremes: Casson, 145.
“by the sea”: Mahan, 15.
Carthage’s surrender: The brief, one-sided Third Punic War, initiated by Rome on flimsy pretexts, ended in 146 BC with the destruction and plowing under of the city of Carthage itself.
influence indirectly: Where force was required against a hardened enemy, such as Macedon, it deployed its army as a first resort. Only when absolutely required by military exigencies did it exercise its naval might directly.
1,000 ships: Casson, 180.
ruling triumvirate: Norwich, Middle Sea, 34.
civil war: In all some 1,000 ships and tens of thousands of Roman mariners were lost throughout Rome’s civil wars.
help of the catapult grapnel: Reinhold, 29–34, 161. Agrippa also built Rome’s first naval port to support the sea war.
thirty- to sixty-day voyage: Casson, 206–207.
position vertical to the water: Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, 355.
grind 10 tons: Williams, 55–56.
hydraulicking: Bernstein, Power of Gold, 14. Hydraulicking’s horrendous environmental impacts, including the denuding of hillsides, topsoil erosion that destroyed farmland, and the silting up of rivers and harbors, finally caused Californians in 1884 to rise up and have it outlawed.
concrete was derived: Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean, 30; “Secrets of Lost Empires: Roman Bath.” Heating common limestone to high temperatures for a prolonged period produced a very light derivative, quicklime. Adding water caused the hot quicklime to sizzle, steam, swell, and ultimately transmute into a new material: a very fine powder, or “hydrated lime.” Adding more water to the lime powder created a putty adhesive strong enough to bind sand, stone, and crushed tile chips, which were the coarse components of Roman concrete; later, where possible, Romans used volcanic ash. When hardened, the substance became miraculously waterproof.
Aqua Appia: Evans, Water Distribution in Ancient Rome, 65–74.
Hellenist water engineering: Aicher, 2–3.
total aqueduct water: Evans, 140–141.
only six cities: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 282.
150 to 200 gallons: Peter Aicher, cited in “Secrets of Lost Empires: Roman Bath.”
best water quality: Rome’s suburban hills had fresh springs and deep volcanic lakes, while the porous travertine bedrock of its surrounding valleys acted like a natural purifying filter for underlying aquifers. Romans tried to use the best-quality water for human consumption and route brinier and poorer-tasting water for tasks like irrigation, street cleaning, and filling theater basins for mock sea battles.
“have laid hands upon the conduits”: Frontinus, 128.
Waterworks were the centerpiece: Evans, 137–138; see also Reinhold, 47–51; Shipley, 20–25.
“sheltered place”: Mumford, 225, 226; “Secrets of Lost Empires: Roman Bath.”
periods of aqueduct building: Smith, Man and Water, 84; Evans, 6.
Emperor Claudius: Claudius added the Aqua Claudia and Anio Novus in AD 52. Trajan’s Aqua Traiana was the first to serve the Trastevere quarter across the Tiber.
emperor’s baths: The Aqua Alexandriana was built for the baths of Alexander Severus to replace Nero’s baths.
pirates, Goths: Casson, 213.
The Huns: McNeill, A World History, 195–197. The fleeing Huns displaced the Ostrogoths from southern Russia in 372 and caused their weaker Visigoth neighbors to enter Roman frontiers.
floating water mills: Procopius of Caesarea, 5, 191–193.
“Rome’s decay”: Hibbert, 74.
Martin V: Karmon, 1–13.
“Water Popes”: Nicholas V (founder of the Vatican Library, who hired Leon Battista Alberti to work on the aqueducts) added a simple terminal fountain in 1453 that in the prosperous eighteenth century was transformed into the elaborate Trevi Fountain. Gregory XIII built the conduits that give its name to Via Condotti as well as many fountains. Sixtus V, born Felice Peretti, in the late sixteenth century rebuilt the last aqueduct, Aqua Alexandriana, and renamed it Aqua Felice, after himself; he also added many underground pipes, 27 fountains, and some bridges across the Tiber. Paul V, who became pope in 1605, outdid him with monumental fountains, some by Bernini, supplied by rebuilding Trajan’s aqueduct, now called Aqua Paola, after himself.
Chapter Five: The Grand Canal and the Flourishing of Chinese Civilization
“The Chinese people”: Needham, vol. 4, pt. 3, 212.
33rd parallel: Fairbank and Goldman, 5.
15 times more water: Shiklomanov and Rodda, 365.
“mastered the waters”: Yu the Great, quoted in Fernández-Armesto, 217.
humble water’s yielding: Lao-tzu wrote, “Water flows humbly to the lowest level. Nothing is weaker than water. Yet for overcoming what is hard and strong, nothing surpasses it.” Cited in “Sacred Space: Rivers of Insight,” Times of India, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-3423508,prtpage-1.cms.
millet noodle: Among other revelations, the noodle put an end to the centuries-long canard that Marco Polo had introduced the pasta noodle to China during his famous late thirteenth-century trading expeditions.
Li Bing: Kurlansky, 23–25; China Heritage Project, “Taming the Floodwaters: The High Heritage Price of Massive Hydraulic Projects,” China Heritage Newsle
tter 1 (March 2005), China Heritage Project, Australian National University, http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=001_water.inc&issue=001.
population of 5 million: Needham, 288.
thousands of waterwheels: Ibid., 296.
bamboo tubes with leather flap valves: Kurlansky, 26–28.
Treadle chain pumps: Temple, 56–57.
government monopolies: Elvin, 29.
government controlled: Fairbank and Goldman, 59.
malleable cast iron: Temple, 42–43.
noted Chinese engineer Tu Shih: The device had reciprocating action. Ibid., 55–56.
vertical waterwheels: Gies and Gies, 88–89.
same essential design: The machines, lacking only the steam engine’s crankshaft, operated on the reciprocating action of a rod-driven piston attached to a waterwheel-powered crank. Temple, 64.
one pound of raw silk: Fairbank and Goldman, 32.
Emperor Tiberius: Edwards, 20.
silk industry: Persia, India, and Japan each developed silk culture independently. By some accounts Alexander the Great brought silkworm cocoons back with him from India, but the art of cultivating them was lost by the time of the Romans.
web of international exchange: McNeill, Global Condition, 92, 96–99.
barbarian raiders: The Han’s main tormentors had been the Hsiung-nu, but by 350 a new powerful Mongolian confederation, known to the Chinese as the Juan-juan, had arisen. It was their westward irruption that put to flight the fearsome Huns, who displaced the Ostrogoths from southern Russia in 372 and caused their Visigoth neighbors to enter Roman frontiers. The Juan-juan confederacy was finally destroyed in 552 by an alliance of Chinese armies with Turkish tribes, who quickly established a formidable steppe empire of their own.
“there was insufficiency”: Record of the Three Kingdoms, quoted in Elvin, 37.
Grand Canal: Needham, 307–310; Elvin, 54–55.
one-third less: Elvin, 138.
pound lock: Temple, 196–197.
Yangtze salt and iron fleet: Elvin, 136. Each of the 2,000 boats built had a capacity of 110,000 pounds.
“the amount of shipping”: Polo 209.
rice-farming revolution: Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, 146–155.
Champa rice: McNeill, Rise of the West, 527; Pacey, 5; Elvin, 121.
120 million: Fairbank and Goldman, 89.
technological leader: Pacey, 7.
coke-burning blast furnaces: A similar coal-for-wood substitution was the coking process developed by England’s Abraham Darby—one of the watershed events of England’s Industrial Revolution—but only in 1709.
114,000 tons of pig iron: Fairbank and Goldman, 89.
water-powered spinning machines: Elvin, 194–195; Pacey, 24–28, 103.
water clock: Boorstin, 60–61, 76. Imperial ladies of the highest rank were bedded by the “Son of Heaven” nearest to the full moon when their female yin influence was strongest and best able to balance his yang, or male, aspect, and thus ensure the favorable virtues for offspring then conceived. The “Heavenly Clockwork,” invented by government official Su Song, also corrected an astronomical error that had corrupted the accuracy of China’s official calendar. Driven by a noria wheel mounted with 36 water-lifting buckets that made exactly 100 revolutions each day, Su Song’s water escapement ingeniously exploited the fluid properties of water.
river- and canal-fighting vessels: McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 42.
gorge at Chü-tang: Elvin, 93–94.
Cheng Ho’s 27,000 man fleet: McNeill, Rise of the West, 526; Fairbank and Goldman, 137–139; Boorstin, 192.
ruler in Ceylon: McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 44.
Heaven Well Lock: Elvin, 104.
“With the re-construction”: Ibid., 220.
rely exclusively: Some Ming officials worried about exclusive reliance on the inland waterway network. Likening the summit passage portion of the Grand Canal (the Hui-t’ung Canal) to a man’s throat that if choked off for even a single day would result in death, they argued for maintaining the sea transport network. In the event, save for periods of Yellow River flooding in 1571 and 1572, the Grand Canal passage remained uncut until the end of the Ming dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century. Ibid., 105.
China’s inner dynamism: Ibid., 203.
labor-saving technologies: The labor-intensive bias of China’s state-directed economy was notably evident in its prodigious iron industry, in which, despite waterpower’s demonstrated superiority, use of manually powered bellows remained predominant. Pacey, 113.
opium imports: British India’s opium exports rose from 400 chests in 1750 to 5,000 in 1821 and 40,000 in 1839. McAleavy, 44.
free trade: Britain’s policy shift from mercantilism to espousal of “free trade” principles coincided with the rise of its world-class industrial factories, which enjoyed unrivaled competitive advantage. This was not the first, nor would it be the last, instance in world history that self-serving economic advantage informed the adoption of grand economic principles.
worst flood: McAleavy, 59.
Chapter Six: Islam, Deserts, and the Destiny of History’s Most Water-Fragile Civilization
water was always highly esteemed: By Islamic custom visitors are always offered free water. Water is central to daily purification rituals at prayer. Paradise is described as a shaded garden with cooling fountains. And the ritual Muslim pilgrimage, or hajj, to the Ka’bah at Mecca includes racing seven times between two nearby hills to commemorate Hagar’s frantic quest for water after Abraham had expelled her and Ishmael from her tent.
reputable but weaker clan: The clan was the Hashemites, whose descendants include today’s royal family of Jordan.
armed struggle: Hourani, 18.
2.5 million: Collins, 20–21.
ships loaned: The Christians had their own religious and political divisions. The Byzantines were rivals of the Visigoths, who in 589 had adopted the Filioque interpretation to the Nicene Creed that was vigorously rejected by Constantinople and would become a factor in the Great Schism between Latin and Eastern Christendom in the eleventh century.
caliphate’s revenue: Braudel, History of Civilizations, 73.
Its agriculture was confined: Hourani, 100.
built on slopes: Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, 507.
“Not being well endowed”: Braudel, History of Civilizations, 62.
camels: Saharan camels could carry half the weight of their heavier, cold desert Bactrian cousins. Camels originated in North America and were close relatives of the South American llama and alpaca. They were domesticated for food in the Middle East by 2000 BC. By 1000 BC they were commonly used as transport animals.
deserts: Fernández-Armesto, 67.
seasonally reversing wind system: Ibid., 384, 389. Reliable sailing conditions and a relatively safe way home were the major reasons for the Indian Ocean’s precocious development as mankind’s richest, earliest long-distance trade highway.
136–37. In Mesopotamia goods: Hourani, 44.
“Greek fire”: White, Medieval Technology and Social Change, 96. Greek fire seems to have been invented, fortuitously for Constantinople and the West, just prior to 673 by a refugee architect from Syria named Kallinikos. Its spectacular effects in repelling Muslim forces ignited the history of the search for combustible weaponry, which ultimately produced the seminal invention of gunpowder and cannons.
long-distance aqueduct: Valens, in the fourth century, and Justinian, in the sixth century, were the major aqueduct and cistern builders, respectively.
Famine and disease: Norwich, Short History of Byzantium, 110.
lifted the siege: Davis, 100 Decisive Battles, 102.
the First Crusade: Ironically, the most immediate effect of the halt of Islam’s expansion at Constantinople’s seawalls in 718 was to sow discord within Christianity itself. Soon after the victory, Leo III decided to forbid the use of religious icons, following Muslim and Jewish practice. But iconoclasm wa
s an anathema to the pope in Rome. Although Constantinople ultimately renounced it just over a century later, the rivalry between Eastern and Latin Christianity endured for centuries.
Abbasid engineers: Pacey, 10.; Smith, Man and Water, 16, 18.
“in Cairo”: Ibn Battutah, 15. By way of comparison, Paris in the glory years of the eighteenth century employed 20,000 carriers of Seine River water.
paper pulp mill: Gies and Gies, 42.
over a hundred bookshops: Pacey, 41; Public libraries were opened, too. Caliph al-Hakam of Cordoba in the latter part of the tenth century reportedly had a library of 400,000 manuscripts—by comparison, the library of France’s mid-fourteenth-century king, Charles V, had only 900. Braudel, History of Civilizations, 72.
Mesopotamia’s irrigation system: Smith, History of Dams, 81; Pacey, 20; McNeill, Rise of the West, 497.
Nahrwan transport and irrigation: Smith, Man and Water, 18; Temple, 181.
cannibalism, plague, and decaying waterworks: Collins, 21; Smith, Man and Water, 16.
water court at Valencia: All the elected members of the weekly Tribunal de las Aguas sit at a round table and in full public view discuss and settle farmers’ disputes over use and maintenance of water and infrastructure. Judgments are based on common sense and no written records are kept.
parity with Islam: Pacey, 44.
under Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent: Lewis, Muslim Discovery of Europe, 32.
30,000 men died: Howarth, 18–21.
engage on equal terms: Africa was slow to learn about the development of the wheel and the plow, for instance. Moreover, Africa may also have been impeded by its southerly latitude to the main Eurasian belt; biota seemingly adapts best in similar latitude bands, which may have added the benefit of scale to Eurasia’s other comparative advantages.
Chapter Seven: Waterwheel, Plow, Cargo Ship, and the Awakening of Europe
The key technical breakthrough: White, Medieval Technology, 43. The plow had three main functioning parts. The coulter, or heavy knife, was attached to the pole of the plow and cut into the earth. Set at a right angle to the coulter was a flat plowshare that dug into the turf horizontally. The moldboard turned the unearthed clods to the side. After the stiff, nonchoking horse collar was introduced into western Europe before the tenth century, horses increasingly replaced oxen as the favored plow animals.
Steven Solomon Page 58
