English

Engineering in the Ancient World by John Gray Landels (1978)

Preface to the second edition THE purpose of this book is to discuss and illustrate a number of technological achievements in the Greek and Roman world. Twenty years ago most of the information on these topics was contained (if anywhere at all) in a number of highly specialized studies, not all of them easily accessible, and few of them written by classical scholars. What I attempted to do was ‘to give the reader (whether a student of classical civilization or a layman interested in the history of engineering) some insight into the mechanical skills of the two most fascinating civilizations of ancient Europe’. In the twenty years since the publication of the first edition there has been a considerable upsurge of interest in ancient technology, and a number of major works have been published, including an important source-book. It has been fully recognized that arguments based on technical constraints which remain today exactly as they were two thousand years ago can be useful in solving some historical problems—an approach which was pioneered by the late ProfessorJ.E. Gordon. There have, accordingly, been a number of projects carried out, some of them involving a fruitful collabora

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