20 Ancient Inventions That Feel Surprisingly Modern

The Greek engineer Hero of Alexandria, working in Roman Egypt, documented a solution to the problem of temple visitors taking more holy water than they paid for, in his book Pneumatica around the first century CE. It involved a bronze coin that was dropped onto a pan, causing a lever to tilt and open the flow of water from a reservoir. The coin then slipped off the pan, and a counterweight pulled the lever back into place, shutting off the water once again. Visitors could now only draw as much water as they had money.

In 1901, sponge divers on the coast of Greece retrieved the Antikythera Mechanism, near a tiny Greek island, from a shipwreck dating back to the Roman period. Made by Hellenistic scientists and artisans from about 150 to 100 BCE, it housed at least 30 interlocking bronze gears within a wooden box. A user could turn a handle to see where the Sun, Moon, and planets were in the sky. It could also track when eclipses would occur and calculate the four-year cycle of the Olympic Games. No batteries, no chips, just gears turning other gears.

Beginning about 400 BCE, Persian engineers were constructing cone-shaped, mud-brick towers called yakhchāls, which could reach up to 60 feet in height. Walls up to six feet thick surrounded the towers, protecting their interior from the blistering desert sun. During cold winter nights, water was channeled into shallow basins via underground aqueducts and would freeze overnight. The next morning, workers would pack the frozen ice into the tower. Inside, windcatchers pulled hot air out while the thick walls kept it cold through summer. The word for refrigerator in Persian is yakhchāl.

The Pantheon in Rome has been there since around 125 CE. Its secret was a concrete recipe that scientists only just figured out. MIT materials scientist Admir Masic found that Roman masons combined quicklime directly with volcanic ash and water at high temperatures, producing highly reactive lime particles. When cracks formed and rainwater leaked in, these particles dissolved and reprecipitated as a mineral that fills the fissure. That self-healing chemistry helps explain why structures like the Pantheon have lasted 2,000 years.

The coin slot machine was not the only invention of Hero of Alexandria. He also designed temple doors that seemed to open by divine will. When the priest lit the sacrificial fire on the altar, the air in a chamber under a bronze vessel holding water heated up. The pressurized air pushed the water into a bucket, causing it to fall. As it fell, it pulled the ropes wrapped around the door’s hinges, and they opened.

Around 2500 BCE, residents of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa had their houses outfitted with brick-walled, indoor latrines that emptied into covered sewer drains in the streets. Several hundred years later, builders at the Minoan palace complex of Knossos in Crete constructed wooden seat toilets over open running water channels that washed waste away into clay drain pipes. In due course, Romans expanded on the concept by using aqueduct overflow to flush public latrines into the city’s main sewer. No tanks. No valves. Just gravity and running water.

About 2000 BCE, Egyptian craftsmen in the Middle Kingdom built wooden locksets for doorposts consisting of a sliding bolt with holes drilled into it. When the bolt was closed, little wooden pins would drop down via gravity into the holes, preventing the bolt from moving. A large wooden key with pegs that corresponded to the holes in the bolt could be pushed up from the bottom, lifting the pins out of the way so the bolt could slide. In 1865, American locksmith Linus Yale Jr. patented a version of the same gravity-pin mechanism in metal, and today almost all of your doors have this type of lock.

A little over 2,600 years ago in Varanasi, India, the physician Sushruta described how to treat cataracts in a book called the Sushruta Samhita. When an older person’s natural lens turned cloudy, he cleansed their eye with warm butter, then inserted a curved needle into the white of the eye and pushed the lens out of the way of light. This allowed light once more to reach the retina and restored some vision. The eye was wrapped in bandages soaked in herbs.

The ancient Greek inventor Ctesibius of Alexandria devised a twin-cylinder hand-lever pump around the third century BCE, with both barrels forcing pressurized water through a pivoting spray pipe. By the reign of the Emperor Augustus, a professional firefighting force had been created for Rome, the Vigiles, carrying small, brass versions of Ctesibius’ apparatus on carts. They would manually pump the levers to produce a jet of water strong enough to tackle flames beyond the range of the bucket brigade.

In ancient India, the nose was sliced off as punishment for such offenses as adultery, leaving many people with misshapen noses. The Hindu physician Sushruta, who also performed cataract surgery, described a solution around 600 BCE. He traced the outline of the victim’s ruined nose on a leaf, then cut a flap of skin from the cheek that stayed attached at one end so its blood supply stayed intact. Then he swung the piece of skin over the nasal opening and stitched it together with horsehair, inserting hollow reeds so the patient could continue to breathe as the area healed.

In 2019, archaeologists in Denmark extracted a complete human genome from a 5,700-year-old wad of chewed birch bark pitch, dropped by an individual dubbed Lola by researchers. Neolithic Scandinavians would heat the tree resin and chew the gum to stick tools together and also to relieve toothaches or curb their hunger. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, the Maya and later the Aztecs collected the chicle, a type of natural latex produced by the sapodilla tree, which they would boil down and chew for its oral cleaning properties and to freshen breath.

In 132 CE, Zhang Heng, the chief astronomer at the court of China’s Eastern Han Dynasty, unveiled a six-foot bronze vessel with eight dragon heads arrayed around its rim, each holding a ball. A pendulum within was connected to directional levers. In 138 CE, the dragon on the west side of the vessel dropped its ball. An earthquake had occurred roughly 300 to 400 miles away, but it was days before the news would arrive at the capital via official couriers. It didn’t measure an earthquake’s strength. It indicated the direction in which it had occurred.

The majority of residents in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and other Roman urban settlements such as Ostia did not have their own kitchens. Instead, they dined at the local thermopolia, which were L-shaped counters that ran along the street front, with earthenware storage jars set into the countertop. These contained food such as stews, pork, duck, snails, and baked beans, kept warm by braziers filled with coal. More than 80 of these restaurants have been found just in Pompeii.

In the Arctic, ancestral Inuit hunters wore snow goggles (ilgaak) cut out of walrus ivory, bone, or driftwood that featured long, narrow horizontal slits which served to reduce glare and improve their ability to see details on sunlit ice. Separately, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder writes that the emperor Nero observed the gladiatorial games through a polished green emerald, though the Colosseum wasn’t yet built. It was likely used as a glare-reducing filter rather than a magnifying lens. Nero would have watched the games at, say, the Circus Maximus.

The hypocaust, used throughout the Roman Empire starting in the first century BCE and described by Roman architect Vitruvius, heated baths and affluent homes. The floors were elevated about two feet above the ground by brick columns. An outside furnace forced hot air and fumes under the floor, which then passed up through hollow wall tiles made of ceramics and out of chimney pipes on the roof, leaving a warm room with no smoke.

Around the fourth century BCE, Plato, a Greek philosopher, designed an alarm clock that used water power to wake up his students before their early morning lectures. Water dripped into an upper chamber until it reached a certain level. At that point, a siphon directed the water into a closed lower chamber. Air was displaced and forced through a reed, creating a high-pitched whistle. Although no such clocks have been unearthed, the story appears in texts written by subsequent classical authors.

Between the sixth century BCE and the first century CE, silphium, a wild plant resin, was used by Greek and Roman women for birth control and to induce abortions. Silphium only grew on a stretch of coastline 125 miles long in Cyrene (now Libya). Ancient authors noted that a chickpea-sized amount taken each month could work. The herb was overharvested and went extinct in the time of Emperor Nero. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder said the last stalk in existence was offered to Nero.

According to the architect Vitruvius and the engineer Hero of Alexandria, the odometer was mounted on the hub of a carriage wheel and had a calibrated gear such that 400 turns of the wheel amounted to one Roman mile. In a sealed box, a train of gears drove a disc with holes in it. Every mile, one hole aligned with a chute and released a ball into a basin that chimed when struck, letting surveyors count the miles.

Plakous was a flatbread made from wheat dough, topped with olive oil, garlic, herbs, and cheese, baked by ancient Greeks. Cato the Elder, a Roman politician, penned a recipe for the Roman equivalent, placenta, in his farming manual from the second century BCE. Vendors sold them in the street, baking them in clay ovens, then topping them with sheep’s milk cheese, garlic, onions, herbs, and olive oil before cutting them. There’s also a 2,000-year-old fresco uncovered during a 2023 dig at Pompeii, which depicts a similar flatbread platter served with fruit and cheese.

Tabaketenmut was the daughter of a high priest in ancient Egypt, interred close to Luxor, in a burial dated to between about 950 and 710 BCE. When Tabaketenmut lost her right big toe, perhaps to diabetic gangrene, a three-part wooden replacement toe laced on with leather and plant-fiber straps, called the Cairo Toe, was made for her. It took gait tests on accurate replicas of the Cairo Toe to prove that it actually helped her walk and maintain balance.

This content was created with the help of AI.