Water, power and culture in the Roman and Byzantine worlds: an introduction

Abstract

Roman mastery of hydraulic engineering, and in particular of long-distance aqueduct supply systems, enabled the growth of a distinctive urban culture characterised by public bathing and lavish water display in both public and private settings. In the rural sphere, the extension of empire around the Mediterranean facilitated, among other things, the transfer of irrigation technologies between regions of different cultural and geological backgrounds. This led to an increasing flexibility of responses to irrigation problems, and to the development of complex schemes incorporating elements of several technologies; the growing complexity and scale of both urban water supply and rural irrigation systems required the development of legislation to regulate usage and protect the rights both of the state and of individual users of the systems. The provision, and the control, of water supply and irrigation systems, and of water-using amenities such as fountains, bath-houses and ornamental pools, became a powerful political tool for rulers and elites, courting favour with the populace for whom these structures were provided, asserting control over the resources necessary to construct them, and sometimes over nature itself, or emphasising status distinctions by the possession of display fountains, private baths, or private latrines in one’s own house. The Roman Empire, and to a considerable extent also the Byzantine Empire which succeeded it in the east, was marked by the conscious manipulation of water resources for both usage and display, especially in the urban landscape. The articles in this volume offer a variety of perspectives on the theme of water and power in the Roman and Byzantine Empires: legislation, control and management of urban water supply systems; administration of rural irrigation systems; the role of water-ways in the tax collecting system of Roman Egypt; and the extent to which various particularly Roman water technologies or habits were or were not adopted by subject population groups in the Near East. They derive from a workshop held at the University of Durham (UK) on 27–28 November 2009 on the theme of Water and Power: Hydraulic Management and Conflicts in the Ancient World, organised by Anna Leone and Tony Wilkinson (Department of Archaeology, Durham University) with Edmund Thomas (Department of Classics, Durham University). The workshop was sponsored by the Durham University Institute of