For my third History Club presentation, I wanted to talk about the Gardens of Babylon and the machines they must have used to water all the plants.
First I did a drawing based on one of the pictures I saw on Google, then mum helped me pull out all the styrofoam we had collected and helped me cut it so it looked like a terraced construction. Then we got some plastic flowers and plants to stick into the soft styrofoam and decorated our gardens. It looked pretty cool.
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We were going to put steps leading up to each terrace but it looked better without them.
Then we found out how they must have watered these gardens using machines like the Archimedes screw, chain pumps, aqueducts, shadufs and water wheels as they carried the water from the Euphrates river to the gardens. There wasn't very sophisticated machinery in the 6th century BC and they had a long way to haul the water, so nobody really knows how they did it and if the gardens really existed at all.
I made my own Archidemes screw from a pipe and some hose. Then I covered it in sand to make it look more primitive, then covered it in varnish to make it waterproof.
It worked really well!
I also made a chain pump with recycled materials.
That also worked really well after a few adjustments.
I had to put plastic tongues on the edge of the "buckets" so the water could fall without dribbling.
Then a simple water wheel that didn't work very well because it was a bit stiff.
And an aqueduct which would have been important for carrying the water from the river to the gardens.
