What is crazy is there are 3 stones that size there with a weight of 800 tonnes each, there is a 1,600t stone in a nearby quarry that never made it out of the quarry. There are a few other stones over 800t there as well.
Humanity today had trouble moving a 340t stone 106 miles. It took 11 days at 7mph to move it in place for the Levitated Mass art installation.
In the late 1700s Russia moved the Thunder Stone, a 1,500t rock that was carved down to 1,200t over the course of a 9 month journey to transport it 6km. They used only manpower to move it across land 150m a day with a special sled that rode on a track that used 6" diamter bronze balls to roll. The barge that carried it across water was specially made and was supported by two warships.
Probably a dumb question, but physics was never my strongest subject…. But would the mill at the top have more or less power (torque?) than the one at the bottom?
Assuming the water is still (lake etc) at the top, they will have the same power.
The energy you get from the water is the height times weight, and since each mill has the same height for water to fall, they will produce the same.
If you removed all the ones in the middle, then the bottom one would have more power than the top one as the water would fall from higher up building up speed.
I believe it's unchanged. The catch is that it hasn't been in continuous use - only about ~500 of its years, the first years, was it in use (and probably well maintained). After a massive collapse of civilization in Crete, much of the infrastructure was abandoned, ruined, forgotten about, buried, etc.
Photos of ruins and structures from past eras
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