"It is a wretched business to be digging a well just as thirst is mastering you."
Titus Maccius Plautus, playwright
An aqueduct is any artificial conduit for the delivery of water, though the term is often misunderstood to refer only to the arches sometimes used to enable these channels to span low ground.
Ancient civilizations on the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile diverted water from these great rivers for irrigation, but the paucity of supply in Minoan Crete encouraged the development of complex storage and distribution systems for the first time in the second millennium B.C.E.
It is the Romans who are best known for their innovative water supply systems. Between 312 B.C.E. and 226 C.E. the Romans constructed eleven major aqueducts to provide Rome with water.
Aqueducts did not become commonplace again until the late nineteenth century, when rising populations in the United Kingdom outgrew local water sources, and engineers developed systems of aqueducts to provide a clean and reliable supply.
The United States followed suit in the twentieth century with the construction of vast aqueducts to supply its cities, and these, including the 444-milelong (715 kilometer) California Aqueduct, remain among the largest and longest in the world.
