ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Jerusalem Water Channel

Okay, so imagine a big city a long, long time ago, like a really long time ago, before cars or trains or even electricity. This city was called Jerusalem and it was in a desert, which means there wasn't a lot of water.

But people still needed water to drink and to use for washing and cooking and stuff like that. So the people of Jerusalem came up with a really clever idea - they built a big channel to bring water from a nearby spring into the city.

A channel is basically like a really long ditch that's lined with rocks or bricks or something, so that water can flow through it without soaking into the ground. Like when you make a little river in the sand at the beach by digging a ditch and filling it with water - that's kind of what a channel is like, but much bigger and much more important.

So the people of Jerusalem built this channel to bring water into the city. It was pretty amazing because they built it all by hand, without any machines or fancy tools. They just used things like hammers and chisels and pickaxes to dig and shape the rocks and put them together like a puzzle. And they had to make it go downhill the whole way, so that the water would flow by itself without needing any pumps or anything.

The channel was like a secret water tunnel underground - it went for miles and miles, underneath the city and even underneath some of the hills around it. And when the water came out at the other end, it went into a big pool where people could come and get it.

The Jerusalem water channel was a really important thing for the people who lived there. It brought them the water they needed to survive and grow crops and raise animals. And even though it's not used anymore today, people still go and see it and learn about how amazing it was that people could build something so complex and useful so long ago.