Hanging Gardens of Babylon
The screw, the last of the simple machines to be invented, first appeared in Mesopotamia during the Neo-Assyrian period (911-609) BC. According to the assyriologist Stephanie Dalley, the earliest pump was the screw pump, first used by Sennacherib, King of Assyria, for the water systems at the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Nineveh in the 7th century BCE. This attribution, however, is disputed by the historian John Peter Oleson.