More Ancient Heating & Plumbing from Turkey

MikeT_Swampeast_MO

Life marches on and while I'm no longer involved in hydronics and building, I still seek out places like this when traveling.

Gaziantep, Turkey is home to a brand new museum built mainly to house an incredible collection of mosaic floors and pool bases found under farmers fields in the 1990s when a new dam/lake project exposed a previously unknown ancient city.

An incredible addition is the complete "wet area" from what must have been an incredible villa.  While obviously moved into the museum, most everything appears to be original.  What is not original is clearly discernable as it is intentionally a different color. 

The attachments show the toilet room and kitchens all connected by drains as well as warm and hot rooms for the Roman bath complete with an original hypocaust floor.  This is by far the most complete hypocaust I've seen anywhere--usually you only see some (likely reconstructed) piles of the flat disks that support the floor and rarely do you see even a fragment of the original floor.  I presume that the round, fully reconstructed floor was also heated from below. 

MikeT_Swampeast_MO

Really Ancient Stuff

From the far East of Turkey quite close to Iran:



Every isolated mountain in this country seems to have been home to an ancient castle or fortress.  This is one of the oldest.  Perhaps 1,000+ B.C. with only the oldest sections remaining after excavation in the 1970s.  This is a very dry area but the small plain below enjoys some groundwater from a huge volcanic lake nearby.  The lake water is unusable for irrigation or consumption but the ground seems to filter it enough to support reasonable agriculture in this one area.



Utterly no evidence of a spring on top of this small mountain, and I have zero idea of where the water came from.  This is the sort of thing that makes me believe that the ancients had some kind of pumps.  Pictured are what must have been some sort of sink, a toilet, one of a series of huge cisterns, and what must have drained waste water of some form.

DanHolohan

So good to hear from you, Mike.

Keep those travel stories coming! Thanks.