1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

108 4. Scientific Technology
of the wheel, spin the axle, which with its curved rays [or cogs] turns
. . . the Nisyrian millstones. 102
This agrees best with a vertical water mill; 102a this is anyway suggested
by the absence of good evidence for the use of horizontal water mills in
Antiquity. 103 The type of configuration is of some importance: a vertical
wheel is more efficient than a horizontal one, but it requires that the rotation
of the paddle-wheel (about a horizontal axis) be converted to the
rotation of the millstone (about a vertical axis); thus we have evidence for
right-angle transfer gears. For centuries the vertical mill was called Vitruvian
and attributed to the Romans, for no better reason than that Vitruvius
described it without explicitly mentioning its Hellenistic origins. 104
Marc Bloch, in his essay on water mills, says they were invented in the
“Mediterranean East”, 105 among other reasons because otherwise there
would be no justification for Vitruvius to use a Greek word for them. The
vertical water mill might have originated from the idea of using a sakiyeh
in reverse. 106 Interestingly, Bloch finds it odd that this geographical area
should have been the cradle of such an invention, because Mediterranean
streams are not very reliable power sources due to seasonal variations. He
seems not to take into account that among the “Mediterranean peoples”
were the creators of both mechanics and hydraulics. Bloch, a founder of page 149
the “history of material civilization”, was one of the greatest twentiethcentury
historians, but as a medievalist — a specialist in the study of a
prescientific society — he was not in the best position to be the first to clarify
the long misunderstood link between Hellenistic science and scientific
technology.
The testimonia of Strabo, Antipater and Vitruvius show that water mills
(vertical, to boot) existed in the first century B.C. The gears needed to build
such mills were used in the sakiyeh, which is documented from the second
century B.C. (see page 106); they may actually go back to the first half of
102 Anthologia graeca, IX, 418. The Greek for “tumbling down the very edge of the wheel” is
; the meaning “top” instead of “edge” is also possible.
102a [Wikander: WM], p. 375: “A few scholars still take the epigram as referring to a horizontalwheeled
mill, but to me an unprejudiced analysis unequivocally favors the overshot variety.”
103 [Wikander: WM], p. 376.
104 Vitruvius, De architectura, X, v. Forbes ascribes the invention of the vertical mill to “a Roman
engineer of the first century B.C.” ([Forbes: Power], p. 595), and states without supporting arguments
that the Antipater epigram refers to an unspecified water mill rather than to a vertical mill
(ibid., p. 593).
105 [Bloch: Moulin], p. 539.
106 As noted by Bloch (loc. cit., p. 541), such an origin would explain why Vitruvius discusses wind
mills together with water-lifting devices (De architectura, X, iv–v): he would simply be keeping the
order adopted by his source, and that in turn would be the order of historical development.
Revision: 1.14 Date: 2002/10/24 04:25:47