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Photo: Ancient Aqueduct
Photo: Ancient aqueduct
WALLPAPER
Photograph by Gordon Gahan
Jutting out toward the Aksu River, Turkey, this ancient aqueduct is a small portion of the hundreds of miles of aqueducts built by the Romans to convey water throughout the sprawling empire.

These monuments to archaeology and hydrology remain among the most widely recognized of the remaining Roman architecture. The Romans were not the first to use such technology—aqueducts were devised by inhabitants of the Middle East centuries earlier. But the Roman design allowed a particularly advanced form of transferring water across often vast distances.

With the fall of the Roman Empire, this sophisticated engineering knowledge was lost until the 19th century.
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