Tunnel Trivia

Hammurabi

Man has been building tunnels for thousands of years. In Mesopotamia, for example, as early as 2100 BC, the Sumerians, the same civilization that brought us bureaucracy, writing, and abstract mathematics, also managed to build a pedestrian tunnel under the Euphrates river. Where today’s tunnel control systems employ a wide range of field equipment (overheight detectors, firedetectors, fans, lights, pumps, plus dynamic signs and signals to name a few) the “field equipment” in the Sumerian tunnel’s “control system” would most likely have been limited to a burly Sumerian guard. In the tunnel’s next significant control system iteration, that legacy Sumerian guard would have been upgraded to Hammurabi’s burly Babylonian guard. Upgrading today’s tunnels still requires dealing with legacy field equipment, but it’s a bit more complicated.

Hammurabi’s tunnel upgrade solution was not the only traffic issue he influenced. Archeological excavations show that the King of Babylon also had the city’s streets laid out in straight lines that intersected at (approximately) right angles. That street grid system was surely one of the earliest examples of an intelligent traffic solution.