Roman Aqueducts Essay

Clean water is the fundamental need for a civilization to run smoothly and this is one of the main concerns for early civilizations like the Ancient Roman Empire. Bordering the west and south of the Mediterranean Sea, Rome is the capital city of Italy and many people settled there due to the fertile soil and also the temperate climate, which made it ideal for animal rearing and growing crops. Ancient Romans settled in many locations throughout the Italian peninsula and that led to the invention of aqueducts, which is one of the greatest legacy by an ancient civilization that still impact the world today.
Aqueducts are structures that are built to carry water from a water source to a city and it is derived from the Latin word ‘aqua’, which means
One of the main water sources for the Roman cities is the Tiber River, which the second longest river in Italy, which stretches about 250 miles long (Gills, n.d.). Dependence on these water sources meant that their possible growth was limited and with the expanding empire, the government felt that having a good supply of water was essential for their economy to grow and prosper. The government elected a roman censor, Appius Claudius Caecus, to solve the water shortage problem and the first roman aqueduct, Aqua Appia was constructed in 312 BCE (Crystalinks,
Unlike the romans, this aqueduct system in Nineveh rerouted water from the Tigris River using broad canals and dams. The Greeks also utilized aqueducts before the romans and their technique was “to channel water through pipes laid in a secondary channel” (Dembskey, 2009). Historians believed that the roman aqueducts were very similar to that of the Etruscans, which used “techniques of land-drainage and water-supply to tunnel through soft volcanic rock of the region”.
Despite being used in other empires, Roman’s aqueducts are a legacy as they managed to develop it to be more complex and specialized while using other civilization’s aqueducts as a benchmark. Roman aqueducts were built either under or above ground in order to ensure that water flow in the correct direction.
An underground aqueduct was built by cutting a tunnel through solid rock that was 20 feet deep, 3 feet wide and 6 feet high. Workers would then line the tunnels with stones or other materials. Tanks were sometimes placed on the floor of the tunnels to slow the water flow and also to catch impurities in the water and often, tunnels were lined with porous rocks. To prevent leakage, the walls were lined with special volcanic cement called cement pozzuolana