Water technology development in Mesopotamia and its neighborhood is usually associated with irrigation, but not less surprising is the level of sophistication reached in sanitary engineering, including wastewater facilities and stormwater drainage systems. There is evidence that, as early as 6500 B. C., there was a well developed urban settlement at El Kowm 2, Central Syria, about 80 km south from the Euphrates. The city had well planned houses, many of them with drainage systems for domestic wastewater (Stordeur, 2000). Later, around 3500 to 3000 B. C., 8 many cities of Mesopotamia had networks of wastewater and stormwater drainage. Habuba Kebira, now under the waters of Lake Assad created by the Tabaqah Dam, was a Sumerian colony in the margins of the Euphrates, north of El Kowm. It had an important although short existence, located in the middle of the route to the forest and mineral resources in Turkey and northern Syria. It was created with the specific purpose to serve as a trading post and did not evolve from previous settlements. Thus, the city.. was given a true urban layout, the first one in history for which we have evidence... [with a hierarchized] road system provided with a net of drain pipes..(Vallet, 1997). The plan of the city comprised about 12 ha, with all the streets paved with alluvial gravel. ‘But most spectacular in the roadway network is its system of canalizations’ (Vallet, 1997, p. 72). According to several sources cited by Vallet, houses usually had several drains to evacuate wastewater and rain. Sewage disposal could be achieved in three ways: directly to the gutter or canalization (canal) of a street; towards pits located in the city if the house was close to one of them; and for the houses being next to the city walls, directly out of the city by means of canals regularly spaced along the ramparts. The streets had a vast system of interconnected canals which, following the natural slope of the terrain carried the wastewater and rain to the countryside, outside of the city walls. There existed three types of canals: those having the side walls and cover made from limestone slabs, with a bottom formed by two or three layers of compacted clay, a second type consisting in U-shaped open drains, made of clay in units 64 cm long, and a third type made of joined clay pipes (Ludwig, 1977, cited by Vallet, 1997).
It is evident that the people that traced the layout of Habuba Kebira were not designing for the first time a city drainage system, but incorporating the knowledge, techniques and designs of already existing systems in the metropolis of Uruk, situated 900 km from the colony. It is natural and expected, as urbanism spread, that these complex drainage systems should have become quite common in Mesopotamian cities from the end of the fourth millennium and beginning of the third, B. C. Vallet (1997) concludes that, the creation of urban drainage systems is ‘an asset of the Uruk culture and the question is to determine the reasons for which it was apparently lost thereafter’.
East of the Tigris River, in current southwestern Iran, between the Dez and Karum Rivers, about 75 km the place where they join, Chogha Mish, flourished. The region is apt for dry farming, and major channel irrigation does not seem to have been practiced until around 1500 B. C. (Alizadeh, 2008). However, as early as the Protoliterate period (around 3400-2900 B. C.) it was a “planned town with streets, side alleys, sewer and irrigation drains, water wells and cesspools, workshops, and public and private buildings” (Alizadeh, 2008, p. 26). Drainage systems were formed by clay pipes and baked clay bricks, as shown in Figs. 2.9 And 2.10
The Diyala River is a major tributary of the Tigris River in its basin. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago participated in several campaigns between 1930 and 1938 aimed to excavate private houses in the Diyala region (northeast
Fig. 2.9 Drain pipes found in Chogha Mish. Left image: Old Elamite period (about 27001600 B. C.) Right image:. Protoliterary period (about 3400-2900 B. C.). Drawn by the author after photographs in Alizadeh (2008)
Fig. 2.10 Drainage canalization made from baked clay bricks. Chogha Mish. Protoliterary period (about 3400-2900 B. C.). Drawn by the author after photographs in Alizadeh (1996)
Of Baghdad), and the results of the expeditions at Khafagah, Tell Asmar and Tell Agrab were presented in a report in 1967 (Delougaz et al., 1967). These houses range from about the middle of the Protoliterate period (3300 B. C.) to around 1800 B. C. Clay tablets with drawings of plans of houses were found. In the concluding remarks of the report is established that In the temples baked bricks and bitumen were freely used for pavements, drains, and other constructions involving the use of water, but the use of these relatively expensive materials was rather limited in private houses. Toilet facilities were found in a few houses of the Akkadian (2335-2155 B. C.) and later periods at Tell Asmar, but numerous structures which resembled toilets were built in both the Early Dynastic III (2600-2350 B. C.) and the Protoimperial (3000-2850 B. C.) [periods].. .’.Figure 2.11 Shows a toilet whose seat was coated on top with bitumen and ‘built up of baked bricks (37.5x37.5x7.5 cm), five courses high, with a slot of 10 cm wide through the middle. Below the slot, in the paved floor, was a hole about 12 cm square beneath which was carefully fitted a baked-clay pipe with an opening 12 cm in diameter. The joint between the mouth of the pipe and the bricks around the square hole was smoothly calked with bitumen. The pipe was set into an opening in the covering of the uppermost section of the vertical baked-clay drain found below the toilet. The drain was 57 cm in diameter, each of its four sections being 32 cm long.’ (Delougaz et al. p. 176). In the figure, an elevation showing the fitting of the toilet to the vertical drain is also given. Example of a vaulted sewer canal made of baked bricks is presented in Fig. 2.12.
Fig. 2.11 Toilet from a private house in Tell Asmar. Drawn by the author after images in Delougaz et al. (1967)
World History
