Syracusan water networks in Antiquity

Résumé En

During a long period, until the beginning of the 21st century, a lack of interest about the hydraulics in ancient Sicilian towns prevailed: archaeologists and historians felt more concerned by the traditional topics of Classical Archaeology. Nowadays, as environmental research has been booming, some specific cases have begun to be studied, like Syracusan aqueducts which were known almost exclusively from Francesco Saverio Cavallari and Adolf Holm’s monographin 1883. Using recent results, the paper will focus on the topics of the Galermi Aqueduct, investigated by a French team of Aix-Marseille University, and some parts of other channels, studied by local teams of Syracusan speleologists and engineers, inside the Epipolai shelf and the Achradine district. The people of Syracuse, maybe under the rule of the Deinomenids and then Hieron II, had been equipped with pipelines of drinking water as early as the 5th century BC and had increased them all through their history to cater for the needs of the fast-growing town, either for drinking water or craftsmanship.