Hello World! Welcome Friends! The struggle for water has defined human history for most of its existence. Up until about the 1900s, a huge proportion of the globe was having difficulty acquiring and maintaining a safe source of drinking water.
Even now, in the modern age, where we have access to water regardless of where we are, there are areas from around the world in which people fight bitterly for a single bottle to take home to their families.
While it is our collective hope that in the future, everyone will have easy access to potable water – which is considered to be a core human right by the UN General assembly and the Human Rights Council in 2010 – the truth is that it’s more likely we’ll lose it.
We hope the famous “water wars” so prevalent in post-apocalyptic movies will never happen. But they might! For this reason, this article has been devoted to the brief history of water treatment during ancient and times.
Hopefully, if the world collapses and we all start fighting, we’ll at least know how to create an Archimedes water pump.
This article is short and serves to provide the core elements of water in history. To find out more, read the blog at Water eStore for information on filters.
History of Water Treatment
Despite common belief, water is dangerous to humans. Obviously, not all water, but rather water that has been contaminated by germs, bacteria, or viruses that are liable to infect our bodies and leave us ill.
It is for this reason that we realized the importance of digging wells. While humans used to live in hunter-gatherer societies or nomadic lifestyles for most of their existence, at one point we transitioned into more agrarian societies that were dependent on water.
Although crops and cereals can feed us much better than hunted meat and gathered berries can, they also take a great amount of water to grow.
The Fertile Crescent area of the Middle East, frequently dubbed the “cradle of civilization,” was able to bear the first seeds of human civilization mainly because of an abundance of water moisture, which allowed for the rapid growth of farmland.
Well water, however, can easily get contaminated. All it takes is for a single person to sneeze or sling a booger over the precipice of a well for pathogens to start festering in there. While some claim that wells naturally filter water through gravel or sand sediments, which is partially true, wells are also much easier to contaminate.
Unsurprisingly, humans figured out pretty quickly as to what water they could drink or not. This is primarily because over the course of millennia, our evolution has led to the point where we can determine by a glance, by smell, or by taste what does us good or bad.
This led to the development of water treatment techniques, the first of which is boiling water. Ancient people didn’t understand the concept of germs, but they knew that you could improve the taste of bad water by boiling it, as proven by Sanskrit writings dating to about 2000 BC.
Ancient Water Treatment
It wasn’t until Hippocrates – also called the “father of medicine” – developed a water filter that the treatment of water became a thing in earnest. As it is now called, the Hippocratic sleeve was nothing more than a cloth bag through which you would pour water.
Depending on the situation, any large contaminants present in the water would be trapped by the bag, which he would empty and clean. He reached most conclusions by smell or looking at the leftover water, which most likely encouraged his notions of Humorism.
Although the Assyrians are credited with building the first aqueduct, it wasn’t until the later Romans that the concept was perfected. An aqueduct, simply put, is a usually underground but occasionally overground corridor-like structure that transports water from one place to another.
This allowed the homes of many affluent Roman citizens to have tap water, which is an invention most of us no doubt thought was uniquely modern.
Treat Your Water, Treat Yourself
Clean drinking water is critical to our livelihoods. While we might be able to acquire water at any point during the day now, it is only more and more likely that we will struggle in the future. Do your best to preserve as much water as possible and cherish it while you have it!
Click the links below for any posts you have missed:
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Toodles,
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