The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World (Oxford Handbooks)

This book is expensive, but it represents the state-of-the-art in Roman technical studies. It does not necessarily supplant older works, such as KD White's 'Greek and Roman Technology' or Brown and Strong's 'Roman Crafts' but it certainly casts them in a different light - especially with the new information regarding Roman industrial capability, and new outlooks on classical attitudes towards technology. The various contributors are well respected in their fields, and the massive amounts of citation will keep you busy for months on any particular subject.Although it is very comprehensive, it does not cover every aspect of classical technology, and I would HIGHLY recommend you pick up Humphrey, Oleson, and Sherwood's 'Greek and Roman Technology: A Sourcebook' as a companion. Also, keep in mind that this book does not deal with specific nuts and bolts of technologies: you will not find discussions of how much a Roman wagon weighed, efficiencies of harness techniques, mining yields, and other such data points.If you have an interest in technology and industry in the classical world and want a book you can crack open to any page and go "Wow, I didn't know that!", get this.

Great book!

This book covers most of the inventions of Classical world used to extract from the world's resources to fulfill the needs of their societies. It shows that man prior to the industrial revolution was just as smart in the classical world as he is today. These inventions and methods are the underlying foundations of today's technological advancements.

This was required for an elective. This book is easy to read/follow. This was an interesting class. Also, the book was thorough in explaining as much detail that was known of a process or machine.

I've been burned by these definitively titled, multi-authored books before. Perusing the index, prior to purchase, made it appear as if the brief articles were general in nature with names like "Greek and Roman Agriculture," or "Roman Engineering and Construction,", but they read like brief descriptions of dissertations, lengthy abstracts of specific works, or the text of a particular powerpoint presentation. The provenance of only three articles is given in the acknowledgements, the rest are simply called contributors.Articles deal only with one or two very specific aspects related to the chapter title,and due to their extreme brevity, the information if of no value to a researcher. For example, "Greek Quarrying and Stoneworking" in "Quarrying and Stoneworking" by Fant gives a two-page description of the trenching technique used by the Greeks followed by a one page description of stone transport before moving on to Roman quarrying.The salient problem with this volume is the flowery language used to disguise the lack of content. One example from "Greek and Roman Agriculture" is "Mediterranean ecosystems are characterized by abrupt topography and marked seasonality, features that have the effect of fragmenting the accessibility of natural resources and partitioning them across space and time." After reading it three times, the author appears to be saying the Mediterranean has a varied climate and topography.

This is a MUST read book for historians. You must not ignore what the past knew.

This is a collection of short essays about engineering technology in the Greco-Roman world. None of the articles is by itself an authoritative account, but the ones I have read give well chosen citations to authoritative works. Indeed, watching some videos on bronze and iron making using ancient techniques has given me a much more solid sense of ancient metallurgy than reading an essay can, and to fully understand any technical process or tool one either needs to work with it or have many precise diagrams, which is impossible for a short essay. Perhaps we can get a big picture sense of some topics by reading an essay, but ancient processes and tools that we have no hands on experience with today are not such a topic.There are only passing discussions of Egyptian and Near Eastern technology in these essays. It is a shame that there is no single authoritative book on technology in the ancient Near East (Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Levant, including societies like the Sumerians, Akkadians, Hittites, Persians, etc.). There are plenty of books about Egyptian technology, probably because the pyramids are part of popular knowledge. Indeed, there seem to be dozens of bad books about Egyptian technology written by dilettantes; any book whose title uses any of the words “unexplained”, “mysteries”, “secret”, “revealed”, etc. should be ignored unless you have a good reason to trust it. But if one wants to know about Hittite metallurgy or Akkadian masonry, there is only the scholarly periodical literature, which usually closes the subject to outsiders because to read specialized articles requires long training.Some of the decent looking books on Egyptian technology I've come across: Ancient Egyptian Construction and Architecture (Dover Books on Architecture) and Ancient Egyptian Technology and Innovation (BCP Egyptology). The only book I've found on Mesopotamian technology that seems both accessible and reliable is Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries: The Archaeological Evidence.

A great volume to reveal very little.

A fantastic read, easy to understand and has a great section on waterwheels. I felt it lacked a bit of depth at times but this was made up for by the easy language and diagrams, a good complimentary book to Greek an Roman Technologgy: a sourcebook

I would have preferred more explanatory drawings.