Attention to water supply and drainage is the sine qua non for urbanization, and hence for that human condition we call civilization. In fact, development of water supply, waste removal, and drainage made dense settlement possible. (In this book, drainage is used to mean the leading away from a site of all sorts of water, whether clean or dirty.) In spite of the importance of this factor for human history, relatively little attention has been paid to the history of water management, more to the histories of food supply and of commerce as determiners of urbanization. To compensate for that deficit, this is a study of the relationship between water management and urbanization. Other factors contributing to urbanization are discussed briefly in Chapter 6. Many of the “working conclusions” in this chapter and elsewhere are my inferences from the physical data discovered by archaeologists. Very little written evidence has come down to us from the Greek period. We are in the position of reasoning backward from the answers to the questions—always a risky business (Pierce, 1965, 5.590). This is not an uncommon problem in Greek history. Mortimer Chambers has pointed out in a talk on travelers to ancient Greece, given at the American Institute of Archaeology meeting, San Francisco, 1990, that if we had to rely on Greek literature for evidence, we would never know that they had ever painted any vases! Yet no one is suggesting that we desist from the study of vases because the surviving ancient Greek writings do not discuss them. No—we go to the vases themselves for the strongest evidence. In this chapter the emphasis will be on what had to be discovered and organized so that there could be a complete system of water management for an ancient Greek city. If we try to put ourselves back into pre-Hellenic centuries when the world seemed “new,” and look about with curious eyes and that great tool the inquiring mind, what will we see? What did “the water problem” consist of? Millennia of observation had enabled the ancient peoples to become expert about many aspects of their environment such as the stars, so that by about 5000 years ago the constellations of the zodiac were recognized and named, and the science of astronomy well begun.
X.—On the White Conduit, Chapel Street, Bloomsbury, and its connexion with the Grey Friars' water system
