Technology of the Ancient World Each advance in technology led to further technological needs Effective farming and transportation allowed for a denser popula tion and after about 3500 BCE cities began to grow The Stone Age was followed by the Bronze Age in about 3000 BCE when humans discovered that copper repeatedly hammered and put into a fire would not crack which preceded the discovery that alloys of tin and copper produced a strong and malleable bronze that could be used for swords and sick les Mining metalworking and trade brought wealth to the newly formed cities and with it a change in the social structure Armies were needed to defend and sometimes conquer new home territories Construction of fortifica tions public structures waterworks and dams formed the beginnings of engineering This book examines the technology of the ancient world from the foundational advances of Stone Age hominids to the mastery of iron work and the construction of aqueducts in ancient Greece and Rome It studies tech nologies developed for military defense and supremacy as well as those related to the pro duction of food from Europe to the Indian subcontinent It also considers the leaps in technological innovation accompanying the change from a widespread population to tightly settled urban centers 10
INTRODUCTION Ultimately the long history of technology shows the many ways that human ingenuity has triumphed over environment and continues to build on past successes From simple tools to complex processes and machines humans will forever be improving on past breakthroughs to refine their lives and livelihoods 11
r1 e t p a h C STONE AGE TECHNOLOGY T he identification of the history of tech nology with the history of humanlike species does not help in fixing a precise point for its origin because the estimates of prehis torians and anthropologists concerning the emergence of human species vary so widely Animals occasionally use natural tools such as sticks or stones and the ancestors of humans doubtless did the same for hundreds of mil lennia before the first giant step of fashioning their own tools Even then it was an intermi nable time before they put such toolmaking on a regular basis and still more aeons passed as they arrived at the successive stages of stan dardizing their simple stone choppers and pounders and of manufacturing them that is providing sites and assigning specialists to the work A degree of specialization in toolmaking 12
RIGHT RUNNING HEAD 13 13 Arrow points and spearheads excavated from the Czech Republic
