PREHISTORIC ENGINEERING AT LAKE COFAIS. 219 



per gallery is cut only two metres on the west and none on the 

 east, the lower one seven metres on the west and 7'30 on the east, 

 with a well of 4*20 metres in depth. In the last shaft the two 

 galleries are three metres apart, and in the fifteenth only 2"15 me- 

 tres, thus showing a tendency to diverge. This would seem to 

 prove that there was no intention of ultimately uniting the two 

 galleries by cutting away the rock between. It is more probable 

 that the upper galleries were begun first, and that some consid- 

 eration induced the engineers to change the grade and give a 

 greater fall to the tunnel. The mean section of the lower gallery is 

 about two metres, the fall from Copais to its mouth is O'Oll metre 

 to the lineal metre, and its total length completed would have 

 been about twenty-four hundred metres. The cutting of so long 

 a tunnel through so hard a rock with the primitive means at the 

 disposal of the ancients shows not only an audacity of plan and 

 a persistent obstinacy in execution, but also a skill in the art of 

 the engineer and the miner that would be no discredit even to the 

 present age. 



Who were the authors of these great works concerning which 

 history is silent and which are themselves their only witnesses ? 

 Perhaps this question will never be satisfactorily answered. 

 Leake and others attribute all, the wells of Kephalari as well as 

 the canals, to the Minyans, while some believe that Crates of 

 Chalcis was responsible for the parts exhibiting the most engi- 

 neering skill, and others ascribe them to some of the earlier Ro- 

 man emperors. Curtius, in his Die Deichbauten der Minyer, a 

 paper read before the Berlin Academy in 1893, carefully distin- 

 guishes two distinct works and methods of work: (1) the utiliza- 

 tion of the natural exutories toward which the waters were led by 

 means of dykes and canals, and (2) the formation of an artificial 

 emissary to draw ofl: either all the water or the excess of water 

 from the lake. The first, grand and simple in design, he attrib- 

 utes to the primitive or Homeric age ; the last, marked by careful 

 calculation and executed with the skill of the practiced engineer, 

 he ascribes to the age of Alexander, and presumably to Crates, 

 the only name mentioned in connection with it. Unless the 

 future shall bring to light some inscribed stone or other monu- 

 ment which shall give us definite information concerning the 

 promoter who planned or the engineer who executed these vast 

 works, we shall have to accept the judgment of Curtius and give 

 the credit of them to Crates, the miner of Chalcis.* 



* I am indel^ted for much of the material in this article to two articles, by Michel L. 

 Kambanis, in the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellenique, published in 1892 and 1893, enti- 

 tled Le Dessechement du Lac Copais par les Anciens ; and to an article by Dr. Alfred 

 Philippson, in the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft fiir Erdkunde zu Berlin, 1894, entitled Der 

 Kopais-See in Griecheuland und seine Umgebung. 



