[Maursault]

> I'm not sure why BBC finds it so fascinating that the Moors were able to dig ditches and channel water through them 500 years after the Romans had built highly advanced aqueducts in Spain

I'm not sure why many think it is so fascinating the Romans built aqueducts. The Etruscans built hydraulic works as irrigation channels, drainage systems, dams, etc., while the Greeks had also built similar hydraulic structures long before Roman influence. And the Romans neither invented aqueducts nor built the first aqueducts. The first sophisticated long-distance raised conduit canal systems were constructed in the Assyrian empire in the 9th century BCE, half a millennium before the earliest Roman aqueducts.

[fatherzine]

> Romans had built highly advanced aqueducts /in Spain/

There were highly advanced aqueducts /in Spain/ long before the Moors came along.

[Maursault]

> There were highly advanced aqueducts /in Spain/ long before the Moors came along.

It is the fallacy of simple location to try to pinpoint concrete details in explicit segments of space and time. It does not matter to Leibniz where Newton discovered calculus, only whether Newton did so first by up to a decade. It would be fallacy of simple location for Leibniz to claim, "but that was at Cambridge, not Paris." The Romans can no more claim validly they were first in Spain with the aqueduct than Leibniz can claim validly he was first in Paris with the calculus.