THE ENVIRONMENTAL SETTING

Sealand

The extreme southwest was until very recently a region of marshland; forcibly drained by Saddam Hussein, it is now being restored again to marshland. Around Qurnah the Tigris and Euphrates combine to form the Shatt al 'Arab, joined by the Karun from the east before discharging their waters into the Gulf. In antiquity, however, the rivers flowed independently into the Gulf. South of Nasiriyah on the Euphrates and Amara on the Tigris, the waters of the delta spread out to form a huge area of perennial marsh, lakes, and waterways. Reed beds and rushes cover the area, and date palms grow along the waterways. There is abundant wildlife—fish, shellfish, turtles, and waterfowl—and fowling, harvesting dates, and fishing have always offered a productive way of life in the area. In times of political unrest, the marshland has also served as a place of refuge for defeated soldiers, escaped slaves, and other fugitives.

Babylonia

Between the marshlands and the latitude of modern Ramadi and Baghdad, where the Tigris and Euphrates come within 32 kilometers of each other, lies the alluvial region of Babylonia. Its agricultural prosperity depends on irrigation, since the scanty rainfall is quite inadequate to water crops and the rivers' annual inundation unhelpfully occurs around harvest time. The deeply incised and fast-flowing Tigris was difficult to harness for irrigation, and settlement along its course was largely eschewed. Farming therefore concentrated along branches of the slow-moving Euphrates, which watered a wide expanse of plain. The land to the east along the Diyala, a tributary of the Tigris, formed an extension of the Babylonian political and economic sphere; here both dry farming and irrigated agriculture were possible.

Chaldaeans hiding from Assyrian soldiers in the reed beds of the southern Mesopotamian marshland. Sennacherib’s palace, Nineveh, ca. 630-620 B. C.E. (Zev Radovan/Land of the Bible Picture Archive)

The alluvial river plain is almost flat, decreasing from a gradient of 30 centimeters per kilometer to just 10 centimeters, producing a landscape in which the river divides into several meandering watercourses, and farther south in the delta plain below Hilla, it decreases still further to 3 centimeters per kilometer. The meager gradient causes the Euphrates's branches to run sluggishly through the plains, depositing silts that gradually raise their beds and the surrounding banks so that the rivers flow on levees, which can reach 2-3 kilometers in width, raised above the surrounding plain. These provide a fertile and well-drained environment ideally suited for cultivation. Irrigation channels can be cut through the levee banks to divert water onto the surrounding land, using gravity flow. Willow, poplar, licorice, and tamarisk, grasses and rushes, form dense thickets along the watercourses, providing food and shelter for wild boar and fallow deer.

Spring melting of snows in the distant Taurus Mountains, where the Tigris and Euphrates rise, swells the rivers in April and May, causing them to flood their backslopes. Every few years they burst their banks and inundate a wide expanse of the alluvial plains, encouraging the Euphrates to change its course and multiply its channels. The arrival of floodwaters just when the crops are

The alluvial plains of the river Euphrates furnished the agricultural wealth of Babylonia. (Zev Radovan/Land of the Bible Picture Archive)

Ready to harvest means that drainage and flood control are as important as irrigation.

Away from the narrow fertile strip along the rivers and canals, the land is dry, semidesert mud. Here the perennial vegetation consists of scrubby, xero-phytic species such as camelthorn and artemisia (wormwood), which in antiquity were more abundant. Overexploitation has resulted in erosion and desertification in many places. During the hot, dry summer and early autumn (May to October), this is a bleak region inhabited by small, elusive fauna—birds, burrowing creatures, and their predators, jackal and fox. The rains, although generally slight (rarely exceeding 150 millimeters per annum), transform this landscape in the winter and spring, producing fast-growing grasses, flowers, and other herbaceous plants that provide seasonal grazing for domestic sheep and goats and for gazelle and, in antiquity, onager, preyed on by hyenas and lions. In places, low-lying hollows and relics of former watercourses allow water to collect, creating shallow lakes or seasonal swamps that attract wildlife, particularly birds, including sandgrouse, teal, pelicans, geese, cranes, and sometimes flamingos and ibises.

Towns and cities clustered along the watercourses, each surrounded by fields and gardens, and the adjacent desert provided grazing. But the contrast between waste and fertile land hung on the availability of water. Prosperous settlements could suddenly be stranded in newly formed semidesert, as their life-giving river moved elsewhere. The Babylonian landscape is littered with abandoned settlements, great tells rising in what is now the middle of nowhere. And the greater the investment in irrigation works, the more catastrophic the change.

Although often politically divided, the city-states of Babylonia were united by their environment, common problems, and solutions, promoting the growth of a common culture. Sharp ecological contrasts and significant geographical barriers divide this region from the surrounding lands—marshes to the east and to the west a low rocky escarpment marking the frontier with the desert.

The Western Desert

Not far west of the Euphrates lies the vast desert that runs continuously from southern Arabia through the southern part of the Near East, shading off into semidesert where rainfall increases well north of Babylonia. Its fauna included ostrich, cheetahs, and hartebeest, as well as onager. All but its fringes were virtually impenetrable until use of the domestic camel developed around 1000 B. C.E. The Near Eastern portion, the Syrian (Shamiyah) Desert, therefore, effectively separated Mesopotamia from the well-watered lands of the Levant, although a route ran from the middle Euphrates (an area closely associated with Babylonia) west to the oasis of Tadmor (later Palmyra) where it joined routes through the Levant. Farther north, the Euphrates bend brought the Mesopotamian plains within 160 kilometers of the Mediterranean, linked to it via a well-used route.

The desert fringes were home to many pastoral tribes who raised sheep, goats, and donkeys. Some lived in permanent camps and also grew some crops; others practiced transhumance. The vagaries of climate made their existence precarious. A succession of dry years would drive them into the fat lands of their settled farming neighbors to the east and west, whose writings portray them as uncouth, alien, and often hostile.

While the southern Shamiyah Desert is flat and uniform, farther north it is broken up by wadis. In the hilly semidesert in the northeast, the Jebel Bishri, settlement was denser and often more settled; here petty Aramaean kings established towns and fortified strongholds.

Assyria

The desert follows the western edge of the Euphrates. Above Ramadi the alluvial plain ends, and for around 200 kilometers the Euphrates runs through a narrow valley, tightly constrained by cliffs on either side. Low rainfall and very limited arable land mean there are few settlements of any size along this corridor. Near the modern border between Syria and Iraq, the valley broadens out, but rainfall is still too low for rain-fed cultivation, and settlement remains sparse up to the Euphrates bend. Cultivation is confined to the alluvial banks of the Euphrates and occasional wadis where fields and orchards flourish.

Though slower to develop cities and political complexity than Babylonia, by the first millennium B. C.E. Assyria was the dominant power in the Near East. The Assyrian king Sennacherib built this “Palace without a Rival” around 700 B. C.E. when he moved the Assyrian capital to Nineveh. (Bettmann/Corbis)

Control of river trade and communications supported the few major ancient centers, such as Mari, set in a broader stretch of valley, and Terqa, near the confluence of the Khabur and Euphrates.

East of the Euphrates lies a region of semidesert steppe stretching to the foothills of the Zagros. The Jazireh ("Island"), the plain enclosed by the northern reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, is a relatively flat region with a gentle gradient, broken by low, rolling hills, once forested, and deep wadis carrying seasonal water. Winter rainfall coats the steppe in a carpet of grasses that provide seasonal grazing for domestic flocks, wild cattle, gazelle, fallow deer, and, in antiquity, onager. Alluvial soils occur in small patches, but the dissected terrain inhibits the construction of simple irrigation channels, so agriculture is dependent on rainfall. The 200-millimeter isohyet marks the southernmost limit of potential dry cultivation; this curves around in a great arc from the Levant, passing above the Euphrates bend to cross the Tigris just south of Jebel Sinjar and run south between the Tigris and the Zagros; the 300-millimeter isohyet farther north, however, represents the boundary of really reliable rain-fed agriculture. Numerous tells marking ancient settlements in the steppe to the south of Jebel Sinjar indicate that the situation was more favorable in the third and second millennia b. c.e., with adequate rainfall available farther south than to-

The Taurus mountains where the Euphrates rose were the source of many of the minerals exploited by the people of Mesopotamia from early times. (Holy Land Photos)

Day. The area probably also had a better water supply in the past, flowing in wadis from the Jebel Sinjar.

The Euphrates and its tributaries, the Khabur and the Balikh, and the Tigris and its tributaries, including the Greater and Lesser Zab, also water cultivable areas. Springs and wells contribute to the local availability of water, which supports parkland vegetation outside the cultivated areas. Between the low ranges of the Jebel Sinjar and Jebel Hamrin and the foothills of the Zagros lay the heartland of Assyria, centered on the Tigris. To the north, a fertile corridor lay between the low but difficult hills of the Jebel Sinjar and the Zagros, which swings westward to join the Taurus Mountains of eastern Turkey. Heavily wooded in antiquity, these mountains were the source of many desirable raw materials.

The mountains set a natural limit to Assyria, inhibiting expansion into Iran and Anatolia, although the Assyrians undertook trading expeditions into the mountains and periodic raids against their hostile tribes. No such natural barriers separated Assyria from regions to the west. From the Euphrates bend, where the river turns almost straight north to its mountain source, the land is a fertile rain-fed plain, running continuously into the Assyrian corridor to the

Susa, the capital of Elam, was a great city that rivaled those of Mesopotamia down the ages. (Ridpath, John Clark, Ridpath’s History of the World, 1901)

East and the Levant to the west. Here lay the heartland of the Mitanni Empire in the mid-second millennium b. c.e., and in earlier and later times, the Assyrians expanded from the east to control this region, eventually moving south through the Levant as far as Egypt.

Although the uncultivable southern steppe marked a sharp ecological divide between Babylonia and Assyria, the two were linked by their shared rivers. Southerners expanded north along the rivers, often incorporating Mari and Assur within their cultural sphere or dominions, while Assyrian empires likewise repeatedly enlarged their political control southwards into Babylonia.

Elam and the Zagros

Babylonia and Assyria were also linked by an eastern overland route. This passes through prosperous villages along the Zagros foothills, a region of open woodland and grasses enjoying warm, dry summers and mild, wet winters. It skirts the low ranges that jut out from the Zagros; of these the most formidable is the Jebel Hamrin, a steep and rugged range rising to 200-300 meters that presents a major barrier dividing the lands of the north from the plains of Babylonia. The Diyala River cuts a pass through Jebel Hamrin, and from here the route follows the Diyala to its confluence with the Tigris some 180 kilometers to the southwest. South of the Diyala, marshes divide the Babylonian plain from Susiana (Khuzestan).

Although Susiana is geologically part of the southern plain, it was culturally and economically quite distinct from Babylonia. Apart from marshes in the extreme south and an arid zone south of Ahwaz, the region lies within the area where rain-fed agriculture is possible. Five rivers rising in the Zagros, of which the Karun and the Karkheh are the most substantial, allow productivity to be increased by irrigation.

Cultivation was only a part of the farming economy of Susiana, where trans-humant sheep and goat pastoralism has great antiquity. In winter, flocks grazed on the plains and foothills, covered in tamarisk, pistachio, jujube, and grasses, and in summer in upland pastures of the Zagros, where in antiquity there were widespread open forests (now largely denuded), mainly of oak and pistachio, interspersed with abundant herbaceous vegetation, home to herds of red deer, roe deer, wild sheep, and wild goat.

Susiana and the adjacent Zagros region became known to the Mesopotamians as Elam. Through history, Elam varied in extent, at times including Anshan, the mountains and coastal plain along the eastern side of the Gulf. From the Zagros, Elam looked east across the Iranian plateau with which it often had close economic and cultural ties. To the west, routes around the northern and southern edges of the marshes gave access to Babylonia, by turns friendly or inimical to Elam; the northern passage also joined routes into Assyria, with whom Elam often had hostile relations.

The Diyala River, Elam's northern boundary, was one of the main access routes into the Zagros Mountain chain, which rises to 3,600-4,000 meters in a series of steep terraces, well watered and lushly vegetated in antiquity. In places, patches of grass-covered soil along valleys or on hillside terraces give the opportunity for small communities to practice cultivation, although pas-toralism has always provided the main way of life. The high Zagros offers rich summer pastures, and in the bitter winters grazing is found on the lower slopes or foothills on either side of the mountains. Three larger intermontane valleys—the Shahrizur, Rania, and Rowanduz plains—offer scope for more dense settlement, but the difficulty of movement through the Zagros meant that they were always home to tribal groups rather than larger political entities. From the Zagros, Assyria and Babylonia were frequently raided by groups speaking many languages, such as Hurrians, Guti, and Kassites.