Surveying Instruments of Greece and Rome

by M.J.T. Lewis

The Greeks and Romans achieved extraordinary feats of surveying in building their aqueducts, tunnels and roads and in measuring the circumference of the earth and the heights of mountains. This book, which contains translations of all the ancient texts on surveying instruments, including major sources hitherto untapped, sets out to reconstruct the instruments and to explain how they were used. The subject has never been tackled before in this detail, and a level of technical sophistication emerges which must count as one of the greatest achievements of the ancient world.

Genres: History

412 pages, Paperback

First published May 2, 1997

Reviews

[Jindřich Zapletal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book. The reader will find surveying instruments and common surveying tasks from antiquity, tunnelling and aqueduct building methodologies, analysis of a number of specific aqueducts and tunnels, and translations from Hero's land-surveying book and other sources, including later Arabic literature. The author also attempted a reconstruction of a Roman leveling instrument libra and evaluated its precision by own experiments in the field. The intended key message of the book is that in the hands of a skilled operator, leveling sighting instruments with no optics and no bubble levels can be precise enough to allow for surveying even the shallowest of Roman aqueducts.

I loved every sentence of it. It turns out that the leveling survey methodology from Hero's book is pretty much the same as what I went through as a staff assistant at a land surveying company some years ago.

The book requires great familiarity with the world of Mediterranean antiquity including its scientific authors, and some familiarity with common surveying tasks and their difficulty.