

After them came the Islamic world, which, in the Middle Ages stimulated society to find new mechanical devices and set the foundations that would lead to the Renaissance. This paper begins with the anonymous mechanical developments that appeared in Prehistory and opened up the way to the first civilisations, marked to a large extent, maybe, by Greco-Roman culture in Europe and by China in Asia. This paper attempts to link progress in Mechanical Engineering to the great cultures that have arisen throughout the History of Mankind. For this reason, the History of Machines embraces a very broad period of the History of Mankind, and can be studied from many perspectives. Mechanical Engineering is probably the forerunner of many branches of Engineering and has persistently been their companion up to the present.
