The oldest literary reference to a working saw comes from the Roman poet Ausonius who, in his poem Mosella (about landscapes traversed by the Moselle River in Germany) composed at the end of the 4th century AD, describes the screeching sound of a water saw cutting marble .
However, the oldest representation was found on a sarcophagus from the ancient city of Hierapolis, in present-day Turkey. The city, whose ruins stand atop present-day Pamukkale (the famous landscape of limestone terraces and white travertine, of which it is a part) had been founded by the Hellenistic king Eumenes II of Pergamon around 180 BC. and during the Roman period it became an important thermal and rest center for the elites of the empire.
Destroyed by an earthquake in 1354, the city was first briefly excavated by the German archaeologist Carl Humann in 1887. It would not be until 1957 that a systematic excavation would begin at the site, led by the Italian Paolo Verzone.
Since then, the demolition of the modern hotels and the restoration of the site, which includes a theater, a nymphaeum, a temple of Apollo, baths and even the tomb of the apostle Philip, would be undertaken.
Three necropolises with sarcophagi were also found. On the north side appeared that of a local miller named Marcus Aurelius Ammianus, dated to the 3rd century AD. and in which there is a relief that represents the first known machine that incorporates a connecting rod and a crank, together with a hydraulic wheel that drives two frame saws through a gear train to cut rectangular blocks of stone or marble. The relief is accompanied by an inscription in Greek that attributes the mechanism to Ammiano's skill with wheels. .
The water mill that powers the double-cut saw, the first hydraulic saw of which we have graphic representation, is supposed to have existed on the site sometime in the 3rd century AD.
Others have been discovered in recent years in places such as Gerasa (Jordan) and Ephesus, but all are from a later period (5th and 6th centuries). Pliny the Elder said the following about cutting marble:
Interestingly, all the components necessary to build a steam engine were already known in Roman times, although it would not be invented until 1712:the crank and connecting rod system, the cylinder and piston, the valves, the gears and Heron's aeolipile of Alexandria (the first thermal engine in history, which worked with steam).
According to Klaus Grewe the representation of the mechanism in the sarcophagus is not at all clear. It seems that what Ammianus intended with the relief was to demonstrate firstly the invention of the transmission or gear and secondly, that the saw was connected to it . The inscription, as we said, names him as the manufacturer of the device, but says nothing about its operation.
The relief shows the machine sawing, with one of the stone blocks already semi-cut, but it lacks all kinds of technical details, impossible to capture in such a work.
According to Grewe, it could be due to the fact that Amiano did not consider the discovery of the saw itself as a reason for merit, but rather the transmission from the hydraulic wheel with all its axes, pinions, crankshafts and connecting rods. We have before us probably the oldest exposure of a transmission .
The Ammianus sarcophagus is one of the most important discoveries in the history of technology, since until the time of its discovery it was believed that the propulsion of machines with this type of transmission had not been invented until the Middle Ages.
One can only speculate, says Grewe, that Ammianus was the inventor of the crank or crank wheel, to convert rotary motion to linear motion, and that he was also the inventor of the water-powered stone saw. It would have been a revolutionary and tremendous invention. The Hierapolis relief shows us that, in any case, Ammianus and the Romans knew and applied this technique in their time, the second half of the 3rd century AD.
Ammiano's sarcophagus is now kept in the Hierapolis Museum, and is not on public display.