Mesopotamia is in the east side of the region named “fertile crescent”, where agriculture flourished and the earliest civilizations were born more than eight thousand years ago. In the alluvial plain of Lower Mesopotamia agriculture based on irrigation developed, in contrast to the Upper Mesopotamia, where dry-farming was possible. A complex system of canals and waterworks developed, with the dual function to ensure irrigation and to be used as waterways. Control of water was decisive as a way to guarantee economic prosperity, but also was a source of interstate conflicts and a political tool. Water technology was not limited to irrigation, Mesopotamians also pioneered in sanitary engineering, with many cities presenting networks of wastewater and stormwater drainage systems. Overexploitation of land and water resources for agriculture affected the environment, resulting in silting and soil salinization, matter that has been recorded since the earliest cuneiform writings.
Mesopotamia is the name given by the ancient Greeks to the land lying between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and its tributaries, roughly comprising modern Iraq and part of Syria (Fig. 2.1). Considering that the origin and development of ideas and techniques are difficult to restrict to a well defined geographical area because migration, trade and military operations contribute to their diffusion, the term “Greater
A. Tamburrino (B)
Department of Civil Engineering, University of Chile, CasiUa, 228-3, Santiago, Chile e-mail: Atamburr@ing. uchile. cl
L. W. Mays (ed.), Ancient Water Technologies, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8632-7_2, © Springer Science+Business Media B. V. 2010
Fig. 2.1 Greater Mesopotamia. (Drawn by the author from several sources. Locations are approximate)
Mesopotamia” has been devised, including western Iran, eastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey as part of the sphere of influence of “the land between rivers”. Although in the text we will refer to Mesopotamia, it has to be understood in this broader sense.
The Euphrates and Tigris rivers have their source in Armenia. The Euphrates (2,800 km long) results from the junction of two branches, the Kara (western Euphrates), and the Murat (eastern Euphrates), northwest of Lake Van, following a zigzagging course in a general south-west direction in Turkey, and changing to a south-east direction across the Syrian plateau and Iraq. The Tigris (1,950 km) has its source near the Mount Ararat and almost immediately flows south-east. When the Euphrates and Tigris emerge from the Taurus Mountains, the two rivers are separated from each other about 400 km. Near Baghdad they are just 32 km apart, but they soon diverge again to join at Qurnah, 100 km north of Basrah, to form the Shatt-el-‘Arab (River of Arabia), which flows for about 220 km before reaching the Persian Gulf. Mesopotamia is part of what Breasted (1916, p. 101) called ‘the fertile crescent’: ‘.. .approximately a semicircle, with the open side toward the south, having the west end at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean, the center directly north of Arabia, and the east end at the north end of the Persian Gulf...’, where agriculture flourished and the earliest settlements took place. It is usually divided into Upper and Lower Mesopotamia. Upper Mesopotamia is a large piedmont zone flanked by semiarid highlands where dry-farming is possible. Lower Mesopotamia is an alluvial plain where irrigation-based agriculture developed. In this region, the Tigris and Euphrates flow with such a low gradient that they meander considerably and throw numerous side-branches. Like all meandering rivers they raise their own beds, so that they frequently flow above the level of the plain, their overflow tending to create permanent lakes and marshes, and they occasionally change their course (Roux, 1992). As far as 500 km from the Gulf, the average slope of the terrain is around 1:25,000. Six and five thousands years ago, the shoreline was situated more than 200 km farther inland than it is nowadays, and cities like Ur, Eridu and Diqdiqah were virtual seaports. The marshes south of these cities were considered by the ancients as part of the Persian Gulf (Jacobsen, 1960), which was called the ‘Sea’ (or ‘Lower Sea’ to distinguish it from the Mediterranean, that was the ‘Upper Sea’, King, 1918, p. 8).
Mesopotamian cosmography is deeply linked to the water, and in many aspects is a mirror of the geography known by the people that inhabited the region. Thus, in the “Babylonian map of the world” (a map drawn in a clay tablet from the Late Babylonian period, no older than the ninth century B. C., Horowitz, 1998), the earth is surrounded by the cosmic ocean, beyond which there exists several (eight?) regions, depicted as triangles in the map, and have been interpreted as islands, mountains or distant land masses (Horowitz, 1998, pp. 30-32). In the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian Epic of the Creation, Marduk (a former second rank god that became the most important of the Babylonian pantheon under Hammurabi’s reign) created the sources of fresh water in both heaven and earth. First, he produced precipitation and appointed himself as the god controlling the weather (Horowitz, 1998, pp. 117118): ‘... He collected it and rolled into clouds / To raise the wind, to make the rain fall...’. After creation of precipitation, Marduk created the sources of fresh water on the earth from the body of the goddess Tiamat: ‘... He set up her head, headed up dirt / Then he opened up the string, it became saturated with water / Then he opened the Euphrates and Tigris in her eyes / He plugged her nostrils, left... behind /He heaped up the distant mountains on her breast / Then he drilled a water hole to carry the catchwater...’. According to Horowitz (1998), ‘distant mountains seem to include all the mountains under the Sun, and the waters of the water hole and catchwater presumably refer to pools of water in the mountains that feed the springs that flow down to the plains’. It is interesting to mention the role of the mountains as source of fresh water in this early understanding of the world’s hydrology.
The Euphrates (Sumerian: Buranun; Akkadian: Purattu) and Tigris (Sum.: Idigina or Idigna; Akk.: Idiqlat) rivers shaped both the society and the mind of ancient Mesopotamians. The climate of central and southern Mesopotamia is such that flood periods of the rivers occur between April and June, too late for winter crops and too early for summer crops. For an agriculture based society, to ensure irrigation was a permanent concern, and a complex system of canals, reservoirs, dykes, etc. was developed in order to ensure appropriate water supply to the fields (Roux, 1992). Although the concept of ‘hydraulic society’ (in the sense of oriental despotic power, Wittfogel, 1957) has been challenged and evidence exists of irrigation systems used in the early stage of the state formation, previous to the existence of a powerful centralized state (see, for example, Adams, 1974; Gibson, 1974). The fact is that large labor forces and cooperation of many communities were necessary to create and maintain an efficient network of canals. Independently of the discussion regarding the sequence of the formation of the state and the building of irrigation nets, there is no doubt that, at some point, construction and maintenance needed some centralized control. Thus, it is not a surprise that one of the laws from the first written law-“code”, the laws of Ur-Nammu (first king of Sumer and Akkad between 2112 and 2085 B. C.), refers to the penalty that a man has to pay when he causes to flood a cultivated field. Law 28 says: ‘If a man caused water to flood the cultivated field of a(nother) man, he shall measure out (to him) three gur of barley per Ika of field’1 (Finkelstein, 1966). The same idea is reinforced 350 years later in the Code of Hammurabi (1795-1750 B. C., king of Babylon), where several laws deal with maintenance and operation of dykes and canals (Harper, 1904).2 Mesopotamia was also the place where writing was invented in a date earlier than 3000 B. C., evolving from clay tokens used to record concrete quantities up to the cuneiform writing, able to document elaborated thoughts (Schmandt-Besserat, 1992).
Water was ever present in all aspects of Mesopotamian life, including religion, politics, law, economy, international affairs, war, etc. It cannot be overlooked that the word for water in Sumerian is the same for semen (“a”, written TT). The Enuma Elish indicates that in the beginning already existed the waters,3 Distinguishing between Apsu, conceived as a male god of sweet waters, and Tiamat, his spouse, a goddess of salt water. Also, apsu denotes the freshwater upon which the earth floated. As underground waters, apsu may be reached when laying the foundations of a temple,4 and also appears naturally in pools and marshes (Jacobsen, 1946). The apsu is the domain of one of the most important gods in the Mesopotamian pantheon, Enki (Sum.) - or Ea (Akk.)- who is depicted with a cascade of water emanating from his shoulders, or holding a vase from where water emerges, as shown in Fig. 2.2. Enki, as master of the fresh water is a creator god. It should not be overlooked that Enki is a wise god, always ready to help humans.
Mankind was created to alleviate the gods from the hard work they had to do. Tablet I from the Atra-Hasis epic about the creation and early history of man beginS5: ‘When the gods like men / bore the work and suffered the toil...’. The heavy work included digging and maintenance of canals. But the lesser gods did not tolerate this state of affairs, and they rebelled (‘... they set fire to their tools, / fire to their spades they put / and flame to their hods...’). As a result, mankind was created: ‘... Let the birth-goddess create offspring / and let man bear the toil of the gods...’. And men ‘with picks and spades they built the shrines, / they built the big canals banks / for food of the peoples, for sustenance of the gods’. However, ‘Twelve hundred years had not yet passed’, the peoples multiplied and with their
5
Fig. 2.2 Seals with the representation of the water god Enki - Ea. Upper image: Old Babylonian seal (ca. 1700 B. C.). The god with water flowing from his shoulders. Lower image: Akkadian cylinder seal (ca. 2300 B. C.). The god seated on a stool and holding up a jar from which water spouts and falls. (Formerly in the private collection of Dr. Bron Lipkin, London, UK)
Noise disturbed the gods who decided to exterminate mankind. At this point, Enki intervened alerting one man, Atra-Hasis, who was instructed how to escape from the plan of the gods and let the mankind to survive. Tablet II refers to one of the ways the gods attempted to eradicate mankind from the earth: .. Adad [god of
Weather] should withhold his rain, / and below, the flood should not come up from
The abyss /____/ let the fields diminish their yields...’. Famine arose not only from
The drought, but also because the soil turned no apt for agriculture due to salinization: .. the black fields became white, / the broad plain was choked with salt
...’. Not succeeding with famine (due to Enki’s intervention), the gods decided a devastating flood that ‘tear up the mooring poles’ and ‘make the dykes overflow’. Tablet III describes that ‘for seven days and seven nights / came the deluge, the storm, the flood’. The Sumerian version of the flood (Lambert and Millard, 1999) explicitly says that construction and maintenance of water channels was a god’s decision ‘... he (the god) did not stop the yearly flood, but dug the ground and brought the water, / he established the cleaning of the small canals and the irrigation ditches...’.
The goal of artificial canals was not only to ensure irrigation, but also they were used as waterways. An example is found in Gudea’s cylinder A, mentioning that Gudea, king of Lagash between 2141 and 2122 B. C., set the foot on his cargo boat, headed it towards the city of Nina by the Idninashdu, navigating with joy along the “new channel” (Lara Peinado, 1996). The Idninashdu was an important artificial canal, fed with water from the Euphrates, connecting the cities of Nina (current Surghul), Lagash, Girsu and Zabalam. Representations of boats are found in seals, relieves and models, like those depicted in Figs. 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5.
The double function of artificial canals was not exempt of stress, particularly for those officials responsible of agricultural production before the ruler. As Bonneterre (2003) pointed out, to ensure navigability in artificial canals, it was necessary to raise the levees, increasing the hazard of a failure, and risking not just the canal but also the cultivated area.
Fig. 2.3 Impression of an Akkadian (2350-2000 B. C.) cylinder seal with a boat scene. (Louvre museum. Photo taken by the author)
Fig. 2.4 Detail of a bass relief from the palace of Sargon II (Louvre museum. Photo taken by the author)
Fig. 2.5 Model of a boat found in Jemdat Nasr (ca. 3000 B. C.) (Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)
World History
