Hierapolis Sawmill

The Hierapolis sawmill was a water powered stone cutting mill in the ancient city of Hierapolis in Roman Asia, in what is now Turkey, dating to the second half of the third century AD. It used a waterwheel driven by a mill race to turn a gear train that worked two frame saws through connecting rods and cranks, cutting stone blocks mechanically. Evidence for the mill survives on a relief carved on the sarcophagus of a local miller named Marcus Aurelius Ammianos, and the device is significant as the earliest known machine to combine a crank with a connecting rod into a crank-slider mechanism, pushing back the known date of that mechanism by roughly a thousand years.