When did the Romans get aqueducts?
Roman aqueduct
Rome's first aqueduct was built in 312 BC, and supplied a water fountain at the city's cattle market. By the 3rd century AD, the city had eleven aqueducts, sustaining a population of over a million in a water-extravagant economy; most of the water supplied the city's many public baths. Cities and towns throughout the Roman Empire emulated this model, and funded aqueducts as objects of public interest and civic pride, "an expensive yet necessary luxury to which all could, and did, aspire".
Solomon's Pools
The growing water needs of the Jerusalem Temple and the pilgrims it attracted during the later part of the Second Temple period, led to efforts to create a conduit able to reach the relatively high top of the Temple Mount by gravity alone. The hills south of Jerusalem are higher than the city and its Temple Mount, and contain a number of perennial springs, offering a good choice to the ancient engineers. The water system gradually created consisted of two aqueducts feeding the pools, which themselves acted as a collection and distribution facility, and of three further aqueducts carrying the water north to Jerusalem (two) and to Herodium (the third one). Together, the five aqueducts totalled some 80 kilometres in length.
Recent evidence suggests that the lower pool was probably constructed during the Hasmonean period, between mid-second and mid-first century BC. It is connected to the so-called Lower or Low Level Aqueduct, built at the same time, which carries the water over a distance of 21.5 km to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
A second phase occurred when Herod the Great, using Roman engineering and in connection with his rebuilding program of the Second Temple, created the sophisticated Wadi el-Byiar Aqueduct, which fed the upper pool. The aqueduct was partially built as a tunnel which collected underground water from the aquifer it was passing through, in the way of a qanat, to supplement the spring water and surface runoff it was also carrying. Water from the same upper pool was taken to Jerusalem's Upper City, where Herod had erected his new palace, through the king's ambitious so-called Upper or High Level Aqueduct. North of Bethlehem a tall bridge consisting of two levels of arches helped pass a deep valley.
In a third phase, Roman prefect Pontius Pilate built of aqueduct bringing yet more water to Solomon's Pools from the large collection pools at Arrub to the south.
The water system based on Solomon's Pools has provided water to Jerusalem, on and off, for two millennia, all until 1967. The Low Level Aqueduct was the longest serving of the Jerusalem-bound ones. It started at the lower pool and once it reached Jerusalem, it crossed the Tyropoeon Valley over a bridge to find its way onto the Temple Mount platform, where it ended inside the great cisterns hidden underneath its surface.
Major repairs to the water system were done by the 10th Roman Legion, "Legio Fretensis" during the second century CE, later by the Mamluks, the Ottomans and the British. In 1902 for instance, a new 16 km pipeline to Jerusalem was inaugurated to mark the 60th birthday of the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II