Science and Technology in the Bronze Age

Bag Press

• Olives and grapes were originally pressed by treading on them with the feet, but around 3000 B.C.  we  find pictures of the bag press on  the  walls  of Egyptian tomb
• For the bag press a cloth was filled with grapes or  other juicy substances and folded in such a way that the  two ends  on  each side enfolded a stick; the two  sticks  were  then turned  in  opposite directions by four men, and by  torsion  (or "wringing  the cloth" as the texts have it) the grape  juice  was extracted. A saving of labor was later introduced when  one  of the sticks was replaced by a noose attached to the upright of the frame in which the bag was hung.

Beam Press

• Became the  major device for extracting juice from grapes and  oil  from olives, was invented in the Aegean world about 1500 B.C., but  it never traveled east.

Saddle Quern

• Most common milling device during bronze age
• A saddle-shaped lower stone on which the grain was  placed while  the woman knelt and rubbed a smaller stone, or pestle,  to and fro over the grain
• Sometimes the quern was a saucer-shaped basin  with  a  rim to guide the  squat  and  bun-shaped  pestle
• It were developed later which had an upper stone  with a  hopper and a silt to feed the grinding  surface  continuously

Rotary Quern

• Toward  the  end of the second millennium B.C.  came  the  rotary quern; in this the upper stone was rotated by hand by means of  a stick fitted into the rim of the upper stone, one of the earliest applications  of rotary motion in machinery.  The application  of small  rotary querns went far beyond grinding cereals,  and  some have  been  found which were used in grinding colored  stones  to obtain colors for decorative purposes.  During this early  period the  only implement used for pounding was the mortar and  pestle. It was sometimes used for dehusking grain (Egypt), but mainly for such operations as crushing ores and minerals.

Shears

• Were invented thousands of years ago (roughly 1500 B.C.) in ancient Egypt
• At first wool was plucked from the sheep with a  knife, but  by  about  1000 B.C. shears came into  use,  being  made  by joining two iron knives with a spring.  By completely detaching a fleece, the shears doubled the wool production per animal.