The Baghdad Battery

Adam Hennessy
4 min readMay 28, 2023
Photo by Thomas Kelley on Unsplash

Today we will delve into the Baghdad Battery — I am sure many of you are familiar with this anomalous artifact, that potentially powered a civilisation — let’s get into it!

The what and the where

The Baghdad Battery is an ancient artifact discovered in Iraq, it has been a much argued about item among archaeologists and conspiracy theorists alike. Believed to date back to the Parthian or Sassanian period, this enigmatic object challenges our understanding of ancient technology and raises intriguing questions about lost knowledge and hidden histories. While mainstream explanations suggest it was a simple galvanic cell — that is an item that uses an electrochemical cell which converts the free energy of a chemical process into electrical energy could it be more? We will delve into that later…for now a little more on providence.

The Baghdad Battery is really a collection of objects located together. It comprises of, a ceramic pot, a tube of copper, a rod of iron and an often forgotten about asphalt stopper. It was discovered in 1936 by German archaeologist Wilhelm Konig near Baghdad in Iraq. It was the fact that these objects were arranged in a very specific order one within the other that bears a striking resemblance to a primitive electric cell, this led researchers to speculate on the artifact’s potential power generation capabilities.

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