Modern Insights About Ancient Water Management

Until now no one has studied ancient Greek water supply, use, and disposal as a coherent system. City planners, urban historians, and economic historians today routinely consider the systems that make up cities as well as the networks that cities constitute (Fig. 9.1). Application of their methodologies in analyzing and synthesizing the data from classical Greek cities is highly unusual (Doxiadis, 1972). Yet as an urban historian well acquainted with the cities of ancient Greece and Rome, my task is exactly that—to apply modern methods to the study of ancient urbanization. (Urban systems are discussed more fully in Chapters 3 and 5.) One could postulate several urban systems for old Greek cities—food supply, defense, residential—each to be considered in itself and in the way it relates to the whole city, as well as how it relates to each of the other systems. This present study concentrates on the basic arrangements for water that made urbanization possible in the Greek world of the eighth to first centuries B.C.; extracts data from the archaeological, geological, hydrological, and literary evidence relevant to water management points to the need for further cross-disciplinary investigations. The four major points to be examined are how the founders were able to choose a site with water potential; how they determined, developed, and utilized the water resources that were available; how water elements were distributed in the urban landscape; and finally what lessons we can derive for use today from study of the water management techniques of the ancient Greeks—simultaneously modest and sophisticated. In the early days, in the third millennium on Cyprus, for example, the settlement was placed next to or over the water supply. From the sixth century, however, some impressive engineering works attest to a new determination to bring water from a distance to the settlement. This determination seems to have been the result of expanding population and increased settlement size, both requiring new solutions to the problem of water supply, coupled with new wealth. The knowledge of how to build underground aqueducts was, I believe, transferred to the Greeks from the Persians with whom they came in close contact in Asia Minor and who derived the idea from the Armenians (see Tolman, 1937, 3 and Smith, 1975, 71).