sábado, 25 de mayo de 2013
Roman Aqueducts in Hispania
Saturday, June 11th, 2013
The Iberian Peninsula has very hot summers, and winters with quite important snow-covered areas, as well as very irregular rains at all times. All this, combined with the ingeniosity of its people and with the capacity of Roman administrators led to quite an extraordinary set of hydraulic infrastructures.
In this article, excluding the 4 most famous aqueducts in the Iberian Peninsula: Emerita Augusta/Mérida, Sexi/Almuñécar, Segovia and Tarraco/Tarragona - already well known, studied and publicited -, here are treated, with varying depth, 42 other hydraulic facilities in Roman Hispania (which included today's Portugal and Spain).
In a restricted acception, the word "aqueduct" is applied to a peculiar kind of bridge used for passing water over a ravine, but in a broader sense means "water duct" in general, and this includes all sort of open air or subterranean ducts, be they made in stone, cement, ceramics, metal or other material, and whatever shape they have (rectangular, circular, oval ...).
I also include - though not Roman - three norias (waterwheels), and a most curious device or artifice in Toledo, known as "Artificio de Juanelo", as well as other hydraulic facilities such as dams or azudes (weirs, or derivation dams).
In other cases, it is not totally certain that all the stones of the infrastructure were set in Roman times, but it is nevertheless most interesting to know more about their particular circumstances.
The full text is to be found in the website
www.lirgua.com, in the article "Acueductos", and written in two languages: the original Spanish and an English translation.
The general image obtained is one of admiration of the Roman performance in this area that, together with paramount achievements in other areas such as military power, road network, territorial administration, Latin language, and Roman laws, explain how and why the Roman people - in combination with Greek legacy - were able to build one of the great empires of mankind.
Standing up over this solid base, the Iberian peoples, one millenium after the fall of the Roman Empire of the West, and few decades after the fall of the Roman Empire of the East - the Byzantine Empire - were able to create, also in the West, two of the great empires of human History, exporting Spanish and Portuguese languages, religion, culture and way of life to hundreds of millions of people in Africa, America and Asia.
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