To the student of architecture it may be surprising to learn that the arch, until recently supposed to have been unknown to the ancients, was frequently employed by the pre-Babylonians of more than 6,000 years ago. Such an arch, in poor state of preservation, was, a few years ago, discovered in the lowest stratum, beneath the Babylonian city of Nippur. More recently an arched drain was found beneath the old city of Fara, which the Germans have excavated in central Babylonia. The city, altho one of the earliest known, was built upon an earlier ruin, and provided with an arched drain constructed of small, plano-convex bricks. It measures about one meter in height, and has an equal width.
While delving among the ruins of the oldest cities of the world, we are thus finding that at the time when we supposed that man was primitive and savage, he provided his home and city with "improvements" which we are inclined to call modern, but which we are only reinventing. (Text) -- Prof. Edgar James Banks, The Scientific American.
