Waterworks in Burgen from 1911

General history of the waterworks
In the Greek city of Pergamon (Bergama), about 100 kilometres north of today's Izmir in Turkey, a waterworks was built around 200 years B.C. that supplied the inhabitants with spring and surface water from tributaries up to 40 kilometres away. The highlight was a three-kilometer-long high-pressure pipeline that crossed a valley according to the principle of communicating pipes. Previously, expensive aqueducts had been built in similar cases, for example around 800 B.C. in southern Armenia, where a 56 kilometer long pipeline brought about 40 million cubic meters of mountain spring water annually to the city of Tuschpa in the Urartians. In the 7th century BC, the Assyrian city of Ninive was supplied by a system of 18 source rivers, comprising a total of 80 kilometers of pipelines. The Hanging Gardens of the Semiramis in Babylon - around 600 BC - were irrigated by a pumping station: a god-driven pumping station lifted an endless chain of buckets filled with water to the upper edge of the sloping gardens. The aqueducts are known in Rome around the turn of time. In the 1st century B.C. Vitruvius describes Roman treadwheels, which were kept in operation by trampling men in the upper part, who thus replaced the power of the flowing water and "pumped" the water from lower basins into higher channels. Around 900, when this Moorish centre was the largest city in Europe, Cordoba's waterworks included house height pumping wheels (Norias), which transported the river water to higher primary canals, from where it was distributed over the whole area via secondary canals. (Source: Wikipedia)