Pete Clarke Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi Hermione,
>
> i think it was an episode of "Secrets of Lost
> empires" where the reference to palm trunks being
> used to raise the water was traslated into a form
> of Archimedes Screw.
>
> I seem to remember it making a certain sort of
> sense!

A couple of extracts from some of the material referenced in my previous post that might be of interest ...

From "Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens: Cuneiform and Classical Sources Reconciled" by Stephanie Dalley (Iraq, 1994, 56: 45-58):

"[...] Given the confusion that we have shown to exist between Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar, between Nineveh and Babylon, and between Assyria and Babylonia, and since the description of the builder given by Q. Curtius Rufus, as 'a king of Assyria, reigning in Babylon', fits Sennacherib, a new look at the location of the Hanging Gardens is required [...]. Using the better resources of present-day scholarship we must look both at the sculpture which shows his gardens, and at the details of his inscription in which he describes both the garden and the machinery for watering them.

"Sennacherib's gardens, as sculpted in the palace of his grandson, are hanging gardens in the sense of being suspended upon vaults, as several scholars have remarked. The relief sculpture shows the features which are described by Greek writers [...].

"[...] Sennacherib's inscription, now known as the 'Palace without a Rival', says that water was brought in to the garden from the River Khosr, which flowed through the middle of the city of Nineveh. The text also describes a new way of supplying water to the garden which was not understood by those who edited the text. The first of them, Luckenbill, missed out the word for copper or bronze at a crucial point, for the sign was damaged, and only when a duplicate inscription came to light was the omission realised.

"Part of the problem was that Sennacherib, having invented a new piece of machinery, had to find terms to describe it. Naturally he chose something from nature, just as, for instance, the Greeks used the word kokhlias, a snail, to describe a screw, and a beam pump is known as a nodding donkey [...]. The big challenge in reading Sennacherib's words that describe his invention is not to translate them literally, but to work out what they actually meant.

"Literally he wrote: 'I invented objects of copper and made them skilfully. I created clay moulds for 'big trees' and for alamittu-palm trees, the tree of abundance, according to the plan of the god, and I poured copper into them ... In order to draw cistern water all day long I had ropes, bronze cables and bronze chains made; and I had the copper 'big trees' and alamittu-palm trees set above cisterns instead of a shaduf'.

"What was he trying to say?

"We know from mathematical problems in cuneiform texts that the word for a big tree is also used to describe a cylinder. What might an alamittu-palm tree describe?

"In 1964 the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary suggested that the alamittu-palm tree, which bears inedible fruit in ancient texts, is to be identified as Chamaerops humilis which likewise has inedible fruit. Like all palms, the trunk shows scars where the fronds drop away, and one can discern a spiral pattern which is different from the scallop or diamond patterning upon the trunk of the edible palm-tree.

"Support for the identification of the word alamittu as a spiral comes from an architectural feature found on several major public buildings. At Tell al-Rimah the facade of the great temple was decoratd with semi-engaged columns in the early second millennium BC, some of them cleverly constructed in brickwork to imitate the edible date-palm with its scalloped trunk, and others having spirals like a stick of barley-sugar. The same type of facade was already known from the Bastion of Warad-Sin from Ur and from Tell Basmusian on the lesser Zab near Shemshara, and before long it turned up at Tell Leilan in north-east Syria, and on the temple of the Sungod at Larsa. But Rimah produced more than just the decorative brickwork. The two types of palm tree were also depicted on monumental sculpture, the edible palm with a female deity, reminding one that the goddess Ishtar is sometimes called 'date-palm' in texts, and the spiral trunk palm with a male deity.

"There is, therefore, no question but that the ancient Mesopotamians visualised the trunk of the inedible palm-tree alamittu as a spiral, and that the idea was not restricted to a small region. Sennacherib used the word in his inscription along with that for a cylinder. The only water-lifting device to use these components is the Archimedes Screw. Sennacherib was describing the cylinder and screw which are the two component parts of this device, and his engineers invented the so-called Archimedes screw some 400 years before the time of Archimedes. This gives weight to the description of Strabo, who claimed that the screw was the device used in the Hanging Gardens: 'alongside these stairs there wree screws through which the water was continually conducted up into the garden from the Euphrates'[...]. Likewise it corroborates the description of Diodorus, who wrote of 'machines for supplying the gardens with water, the machines raising the water in great abundance from the river, although no-one outside could see it being done'.

"What mechanism was used to rotate the screws? It is possible that the 'ropes, cables of copper and chains of copper' which Sennacherib mentions were part of a device for rotating the screws, but he does not actually say so, and so we are left in the dark. Philo of Byzantium wrote, perhaps around 250 BC: 'Streams of water emerging from elevated sources flow partly in a straight line down sloping channels, and are partly forced upwards through bends and spirals to gush out higher up, being impelled through the twists of these devices by mechanical forces'. Note the trouble Philo had finding ways to describe the action of the screws [...]" (pp. 52-53).

***********

"Sennacherib, like his father Sargon, was certainly interested in mechanical innovation. His inscriptions from Bavian, at the foot of the mountains where the river's flow towards Nineveh was first diverted, make this interest particularly clear. When he had described how he planned and built and aqueduct, and the grand opening ceremony in which appropriate rituals and offerings were performed, he went on to describe a sluice arrangement, writing: 'The gate of the river is opened by itself, without using a spade or a shovel, and it lets the water of abundance flow. Its gate is not opened by the work of men's hands'. This inscription too tries to convey a clever invention [...]" (pp. 53).



From "More About the Hanging Gardens" by Stepanie Dalley (in Of Pots and Plans, edited by Lamia al-Gailani Werr et al., 2002):

"[...] In the Greek tradition concerning the Hanging Gardens, another striking feature was that they were watered with screws. Strabo's account is explicit, those of Diodorus and Philo are implicit, and I showed in my first study how a technical passage in Sennacherib's text could be interpreted to support the idea that the screw was invented before the time of Archimedes. The prism version of Sennacherib's great text describes the method for casting in bronze or copper the cylinders and alamittu-palms which formed the water-raising devices in these words: 'I created clay moulds as if by divine intelligence for great cylinders and alamittu-palms, tree of riches', the two items which he later set up over cisterns [...].

"[...] In the course of making a BBC television programme about the watering of the garden of Sennacherib, I discussed with a professional bronze-caster, Andrew Lacey, exactly what the inscription was trying to describe. He agreed with several previous critics, that it was not feasible to cast the screw and cylinder separately, and then fit them tightly, the screw being inserted inside the cylinder, as I had originally interpreted the description. He pointed out that Sennacherib mentioned only the moulds as two separate items, and showed that one could easily produce from two such moulds a single casting in which the screw was integral to the inside surface of the cylinder. The hollow centre of the casting produced by this method was easily filled with a pole which rested on the bearings at each end; this had the advantage that when the ends worn away by the friction of the bearings needed replacement, the main castings remained intact. In casting by this method with a crudely constructed furnace out in the open, Andrew Lacey showed that it worked, and has convinced me that his understanding of the passage about the moulds is likely to be correct.

"Part of the marvel of those gardens was the massive engineering which brought water from twelve mountain streams, through canals, tunnels and the Jerwan aqeuduct, the reach the city some 50km later, at just the right level for the gardens and the palace. The water which came through the garden and was raised up to the top of the garden through the bronze screws would not only have watered the garden but also must have entered the palace at a high level. Given that Sennacherib's water-raising screws supplied both the palace and the gardens with water, the description of their position between the end of the section for the palace building, and the account of the gardens, is understandable [...]" (pp. 70-72).



_______________

My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all.

- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

________

'I am beginning to believe that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts.

- Edward S. Curtis

________

'We are coming now rather into the region of guesswork', said Dr Mortimer.
'Say, rather, into the region where we balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to start our speculation', [replied Holmes].

- The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

________

'It never does to be too sure, you know, in these matters. Coincidence killed the professor.'

- "Novel of the Black Seal" by Arthur Machen



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/06/2006 05:50AM by Damian Walter.