The development of the screw pump from Assyrian King Sennacherib Time to Archimedes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The literary and archaeological evidence suggests that Archimedes was the first to design and construct a mechanical water-raising screw pump. Meanwhile, a discussion pioneered by Assyrian scholar Dalley, based on some bass reliefs in the palace of the Assyrian King Sennacherib (705–681 BC) at Nineveh, suggests that the screw pump was used several centuries before Archimedes in Mesopotamia. We analysed the same texts cited by Dalley from an engineering perspective. We offered a design option if King Sennacherib used a screw pump to lift large quantities of water. The design and operation principle of the water screw used during the rule of the Assyrian King Sennacherib would be different from Archimedes’ water screw pump. Archimedes’ closed-channel design, as described by Roman architect Vitruvius, connects the inside of the barrel to the outer edge of the helical flights on the screw, making it very difficult to design, manufacture and operate if cast in bronze. However, our proposal of a rotating screw in a stationary open-channel screw design was very feasible to build, optimize by experimentation and operate if only the shaft was cast in bronze and palm sheaths were coiled helically on the shaft.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".