Free Republic

In ancient times, the desert in the Udhruh region in Jordan was transformed into a green oasis. An intricate network of underground water channels was part of an ancient system of water management, storing water and preventing loss through evaporation.Archaeologist Mark Driessen has found a new way to investigate and map these channels: a remote controlled car.In 2022 the team started to excavate a 20 meter deep water channel (qanat) shaft, only one of more than 200 shafts that are part of this specific system. Mark Driessen descended into the shaft, entering the horizontal water channels below...The remote controlled car...

The Fezzan is an area of approximately 212,000 square miles of unforgiving desert and valleys. Situated in the south west of modern day Libya it’s not an area you’d easily traverse, let alone live in. Yet in the 1st millennium BCE a people did exactly that. They created art, irrigated the baked earth and sustained a culture. One of the earliest surviving references to the Garamantes is found in Herodotus’ Histories, written in the 5th century BCE[1]. Herodotus’ description was contradictory, they had no weapons, but they hunted a cave dwelling tribe nearby using chariots. He also went on to...

Last September, when Iran’s uranium enrichment plant buried inside a mountain near the holy city of Qum was revealed, the episode cast light on a wider pattern: Over the past decade, Iran has quietly hidden an increasingly large part of its atomic complex in networks of tunnels and bunkers across the country. In doing so, American government and private experts say, Iran has achieved a double purpose. Not only has it shielded its infrastructure from military attack in warrens of dense rock, but it has further obscured the scale and nature of its notoriously opaque nuclear effort. The discovery of...

The Ancient World's Longest Underground Aqueduct Roman engineers chipped an aqueduct through more than 100 kilometers of stone to connect water to cities in the ancient province of Syria. The monumental effort took more than a century, says the German researcher who discovered it. When the Romans weren't busy conquering their enemies, they loved to waste massive quantities of water, which gurgled and bubbled throughout their cities. The engineers of the empire invented standardized lead pipes, aqueducts as high as fortresses, and water mains with 15 bars (217 pounds per square inch) of pressure. PHOTO GALLERY: ROME'S LONGEST PIPE In...