The earliest clear evidence of a water wheel comes from the
ancientGreece and Asia minor, being recorded in the work of
Apollonius of Perge of c. 240 BC, surviving only in Arabic
translation. This has led to suggestions that it may be a later
Arabic addition to the treatise.[3] Mithradates VI Eupator of
Pontus had a water mill at his palace at Cabira before 71 BC.[4] In
the 1st century BC, the Greek epigrammatist Antipater of
Thessalonica was the earliest to make a clear reference to the
waterwheel, which Lewis has recently argued to be a vertical wheel.
Antipater praised it for its use in grinding grain and the
reduction of human labour:
