Egyptian reliefs from 1500 BC depict siphons used to extract liquids from large storage jars.
Physical evidence for the use of siphons by Greeks are the Justice cup of Pythagoras in Samos in the 6th century BC and usage by Greek engineers in the 3rd century BC at Pergamon.
Hero of Alexandria wrote extensively about siphons in the treatise Pneumatica.
The Banu Musa brothers of 9th-century Baghdad invented a double-concentric siphon, which they described in their Book of Ingenious Devices. The edition edited by Hill includes an analysis of the double-concentric siphon.
Siphons were studied further in the 17th century, in the context of suction pumps (and the recently developed vacuum pumps), particularly with an eye to understanding the maximum height of pumps (and siphons) and the apparent vacuum at the top of early barometers. This was initially explained by Galileo Galilei via the theory of  ("nature abhors a vacuum"), which dates to Aristotle, and which Galileo restated as , but this was subsequently disproved by later workers, notably Evangelista Torricelli and Blaise Pascal – see barometer: history.