Episode 76: Pipe Dreams

Ask a Medievalist

Synopsis

If you’re one of those people who thinks about the Roman Empire a lot because aqueducts are really cool, you’re going to love this. Join Em and Jesse as they discuss the irrigation of the Chengdu Plain, the plumbing of Tenochtitlan, and water management at Machu Picchu. Then we round out our “the middle ages didn’t constantly smell awful” series with a discussion of the history of perfume.

Notes

1/ Various news articles about water pollution:
Cuyahoga River fires (yes, plural): https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught-fire-least-dozen-times-no-one-cared-until-1969-180972444/

Chicago River story: https://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/2023/9/28/23895006/trump-tower-chicago-river-pollution-attorney-general-kwame-raoul

2/ John Snow proved that the Broad Street Pump was carrying disease in 1854: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7150208/

Germ theory of disease was actually first proposed in 1546 but not widely accepted in Europe until the end of the 1880s. THE 1880s!
For more on Girolamo Fracastoro see: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-physician-who-presaged-the-germ-theory-of-disease-nearly-500-years-ago/

3/ The Irrigation of the Chengdu Plain: the Dujiangyan irrigation system is a UNESCO heritage site! https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1001/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dujiangyan

4/ Tenochtitlan plumbing: the Chapultepec aqueduct! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapultepec_aqueduct

5/ The Incan plumbing:
An article from UW-Madison (Go Badgers!!): https://ancientengrtech.wisc.edu/machu-picchu/machu-picchu-water-management/

6/ For the record, although there were people in the area of Venice from around the 10th century BCE on, the dedication of the first church, symbolically recognized as the founding of the city, was 421 CE. (There was a Roman city there before, of course.) Tenochtitlan, on the other hand, was founded around 1325 CE (with, again, some wiggle room).

7/ The tallest building in Des Moines, IA, is 801 Grand, which is 45 storeys high. [Sorry Des Moines!!! You are awesome.]

8/ Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression, was published from 1977–2005. In vol. 12 (1996), they did publish an article entitled “Linguistic and Blasphemous Aspects of Bavarian Micturition and American Toilet Names” by the editor, Reinhold Aman. However, the journal is now offline.

He, uh. Really hated the Clintons.

9/ QI bits: I can’t find them. [I think you might need BBC iPlayer or a VPN or similar.–Jesse]

10/ The Ted Chiang short story is “Tower of Babylon,” which is collected in Stories of Your Life and Others. It’s really good!

11/ UW–Madison and building better potatoes: https://pasdept.wisc.edu/2019/10/07/new-potato-helps-farmers-weather-the-frost/

UW Machu Picchu project is part of UW-Madison’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s Ancient Engineering Technologies project:
https://ancientengrtech.wisc.edu/machu-picchu/

12/ Pomander: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomander

13/ Wow, coming on hard with the perfume facts there, Em.

Recreating perfumes! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/may-be-what-cleopatra-smelled-180972854/

An example of a glass perfume bottle (1st century CE): https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/239779

14/ National Theatre’s Antony and Cleopatra with Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo is the best.
https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/antony-and-cleopatra/

Some photos Jesse took of old pipes on Knossos: