Describing historical arts & technologies

Historical description

A famous Roman road is the Appian Way, but the Appian Way is just one road.

This snippet describes the entire Roman road network:

Roman roads included bridges, tunnels, viaducts, and many other architectural and engineering tricks to create a series of breathtaking but highly practical monuments which spread from Portugal to Constantinople.

The network of public Roman roads covered over 120,000 km, and it greatly assisted the free movement of armies, people, and goods across the empire.

Roads were also a very visible indicator of the power of Rome, and they indirectly helped unify what was a vast melting pot of cultures, races, and institutions.

Roman Roads(2014)

This snippet does not describe a single specific road but Roman roads in general.

The language is more high-level than a detailed description of an artifact, but it still describes what, where, so what, etc.

Map of downtown ancient Rome with Cloaca Maxima highlighted
Map of downtown ancient Rome with the Cloaca Maxima highlighted in red (Source)

Okay, the Roman roads were impressive. Now check out their sewers!

Rome’s sewers served multiple functions and became essential to the growth of the city. Using extensive terra cotta piping, sewers drained public bathwater as well as excess water from the marshy swamp areas of Rome. The Romans also were the first to seal these pipes in concrete to resist high water pressure.

The Greek author Strabo, who lived between roughly 60 BC and 24 AD, described the ingenuity of the Roman sewer system:

“The sewers, covered with a vault of tightly fitted stones, have room in some places for hay wagons to drive through them. And the quantity of water brought into the city by aqueducts is so great that rivers, as it were, flow through the city and the sewers; almost every house has water tanks, and service pipes, and plentiful streams of water.”

At its peak, Rome’s population numbered around a million people, together producing a massive amount of waste. Serving this population was the biggest sewer in the city, the Greatest Sewer or Cloaca Maxima, named for the Roman goddess Cloacina from the Latin verb cluo, meaning ‘to clean’.

The Cloaca Maxima revolutionised Rome’s sanitation system. Built in the 4th century BC, it linked Rome’s drains and flushed sewage into the Tiber River. Yet the Tiber remained a source of water used by some Romans for bathing and irrigation alike, unwittingly carrying disease and illness back into the city.

Public Sewers and Sponges on Sticks: How Toilets Worked in Ancient Rome

While this snippet might be more complex, the individual parts are familiar:

  • Physical details about the sewer system, including one particular sewer, the Cloaca Maxima.
  • Details to locate in time and space.
  • Explanations of meaning and significance.

Notice the verbs

The snippet describes the sewer system in action, so there are drain, flow, and carry type verbs.

Notice the flow

(Of the snippet, not the sewer.)

  • It begins with a broad statement about the importance of the network.
  • It describes physical details, including a quote from a contemporary source.
  • It narrows down to one example artifact (the Cloaca Maxima).
  • Then it points out something significant: that Romans' poop was going into the river where they got their water and making them sick.

So this snippet might not be as rigid as a compositional description, but it still has an order.

Try writing a brief historical description of a whole technology or art form.

Imagine it's 500 years in the future, and you want to describe what is known about ancient 21st-century pump pack containers.

Ancient 21st century pump pack containers

To help you out, here are some example phrases from the snippets above:

  • Roman roads included...
  • The network of public Roman roads covered...
  • It greatly assisted...
  • Roads were also a very visible indicator...
  • Roman sewers served multiple functions...
  • The Greek author Strabo described...
Write a brief historical description of 21st century pump pack technology including physical details, location in time and space, and meaning in history.

Twentieth-century pump packs turned the simple act of dispensing liquids into a near-scientific endeavour, in humanity's first attempt at generating a consistent squirt. These devices, ranging from delicate pastel tubes to glossy industrial jugs, allowed every dollop and drip to be precisely measured—ensuring that not a drop of face cream or industrial acid was wasted.

Pyschohistorian Metro Tesky noted the strange contradiction that these packs represent: "The pump packs of the late 1900s were designed to minimise waste but were themselves enormously wasteful, being made of plastics that would not degrade for millennia."

However, this robust design is why we have so many well-preserved specimens found all over the world today.

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