Here’s a book I came across today called Ancient Engineers’ Inventions : Precursors of the present.
This is a book by Flavio, Cesario, and Ferruccio Russo and it takes the reader way back in time. I simply glimpsed through the pages of the book as I was concentrating on “the spring” and how it came into such wide spread use.
The book is likely going to insult you if you are of Latin Roman decent as a phrase in the preface pretty much states that the Romans were nothing but a bunch of lying cheats who stole the ideas of the Greeks and of other societies that preceded them.
Undoubtedly the Roman Empire was a society of great accomplishments ( probably today not yet fully understood ) in many fields of science, technology, and law; they started from the Italian peninsula but they do not just belong to the Italians. First of all, most of the inventions and the technology of the Roman Empire were not invented by Latin inventors; in fact one of the merits of the Romans consisted in recognizing, appreciating, and using the intellectual abilities of other people.
Now that sounds alot like stealing the intellectual property of others.
The authors of this book are Italian and they claim to have a better opportunity to see how the inventions of the early Greek Roman era had a way to move the world. This seems logical enough when one realizes how powerful they became as the Roman Empire was conquering.
The book, or those bits and pieces that I saw of it impressed me.
It is bookmarked and placed on my list of “books to buy”.