Irrigation in Ancient Mesopotamia: Canals, Importance, Politics | Middle East And North Africa

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IRRIGATION IN ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA

Mesopotamians developed irrigation agriculture. To irrigate the land, the earliest inhabitants of the region drained the swampy lands and built canals through the dry areas. This had been done in other places before Mesopotamian times. What made Mesopotamia the home of the first irrigation culture is that the irrigation system was built according to a plan, and an organized work force was required to keep the system maintained. Irrigation system began on a small-scale basis and developed into a large scale operation as the government gained more power.

Mesopotamia was originally swampy in some areas and dry in others. The climate was too hot and dry in most places to raise crops without some assistance. Archaeologists have found 3,300-year-old plow furrows with water jars still lying by small feeder canals near Ur in southern Iraq.

The Sumerians initiated a large scale irrigation program. They built huge embankments along the Euphrates River, drained the marshes and dug irrigation ditches and canals. It not only took great amount of organized labor to build the system it also required a great amount of labor to keep it maintained. Government and laws were created distribute water to make sure the operation ran smoothly.

Daniel Weiss wrote in Archaeology magazine: In ancient Mesopotamia, irrigation was the key to civilization. Rivers such as the Tigris and Euphrates carried a plentiful flow of water, fed by snowmelt from the mountains of Anatolia to the north. However, unlike the Nile in Egypt, which flooded on a regular annual schedule that perfectly accommodated the growing seasons, Mesopotamian rivers did so unpredictably and violently. To protect against the havoc caused by untamed flooding and to provide a steady supply of water to cultivate the land, Mesopotamian kings saw the construction of irrigation systems as among their chief responsibilities. [Source: Daniel Weiss, Archaeology magazine, May-June 2020]

Importance of Irrigation in Ancient Mesopotamia

Daniel Weiss wrote in Archaeology magazine: The pride rulers took in these engineering feats is made clear by a number of celebratory rock reliefs that have been discovered near irrigation projects dating to the Neo-Assyrian Empire (883–609 B.C.). At the site of Khinis, for example, where the Gomel River emerges from a narrow gorge at the foot of the Zagros Mountains, the king Sennacherib (704–681 B.C.) built a dam that diverted its waters into a canal that fed into a series of waterways snaking some 60 miles in all across the plains to the walls of his new capital at Nineveh. [Source: Daniel Weiss, Archaeology magazine, May-June 2020]

Tablet with a field plan

This canal was the crown jewel in an extensive regional irrigation network the king built. To commemorate his exploits, Sennacherib commissioned monumental reliefs, along with a lengthy cuneiform inscription, carved into a cliff rising above the canal head at Khinis. In the inscription, he claims that when he founded his new capital, its unwatered fields were “woven over with spider webs” and its people “did not know artificial irrigation, but had their eyes turned for rain (and) showers from the sky.” Thanks to his new canal network, Sennacherib writes, opulent gardens bloomed at Nineveh, and the countryside grew abundant with crops.

Newly excavated Neo-Assyrian rock reliefs at the site of Faida, some 25 miles west of Khinis, also appear to enshrine the construction of a canal—though they do so in a way that archaeologists have never seen before. While no inscriptions have been found with the Faida reliefs, archaeologists believe they nevertheless conveyed a clear message to an audience that likely would not have been able to read inscriptions, even if they did exist. These were the local farmers who frequented the canal to draw water for their crops. And, unlike other known Neo-Assyrian reliefs associated with waterworks, which are confined to a single location, those at Faida stretch over at least a mile of the canal’s length, blanketing the countryside. “We don’t know anything that is really comparable with it,” says Daniele Morandi Bonacossi, an archaeologist at the University of Udine and codirector of the team working at the site. The reliefs offer insight into how Neo-Assyrian kings kept their subjects in line by trumpeting their accomplishments and boasting of their close ties to the deities who ruled over them all. See Assyrian Canal Below

Early Mesopotamia Mathematics and Irrigation

J J O'Connor and E F Robertson wrote: Under the Sumerians, “writing developed and counting was based on a sexagesimal system, that is to say base 60. Around 2300 B.C. the Akkadians invaded the area and for some time the more backward culture of the Akkadians mixed with the more advanced culture of the Sumerians. The Akkadians invented the abacus as a tool for counting and they developed somewhat clumsy methods of arithmetic with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division all playing a part.[Source: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson, St. Andrews University, December 2000 ==]

On the use of mathematics in the irrigation systems of the early civilisations in Mesopotamia, Kazuo Muroi wrote: “It was an important task for the rulers of Mesopotamia to dig canals and to maintain them, because canals were not only necessary for irrigation but also useful for the transport of goods and armies. The rulers or high government officials must have ordered Babylonian mathematicians to calculate the number of workers and days necessary for the building of a canal, and to calculate the total expenses of wages of the workers. ==

“There are several Old Babylonian mathematical texts in which various quantities concerning the digging of a canal are asked for. They are YBC 4666, 7164, and VAT 7528, all of which are written in Sumerian ..., and YBC 9874 and BM 85196, No. 15, which are written in Akkadian .... From the mathematical point of view these problems are comparatively simple”. ==

Mesopotamian irrigation

Assyrian Irrigation Canals

In July 2022, archaeologists announced they had found stunning ancient rock carvings that portray an Assyrian king paying homage to his gods amid a procession of mythical animals along a canal in the Kurdistan region in the north of Iraq. The Assyrian carvings, which are almost 3,000 years old, were uncovered in late 2021 by Italian and Iraqi archaeologists in the Faida district, south of the city of Duhok, about 300 miles (480 kilometers) north of Baghdad, according to the University of Udine in Italy. "There is no other Assyrian rock art complex that can be compared with Faida," said archaeologist Daniele Morandi Bonacossi of the University of Udine. [Source: Tom Metcalfe, Live Science, July 15, 2022]

Tom Metcalfe of Live Science wrote: The carved panels, dating from about 2800 years ago, were found cut into bedrock above an ancient irrigation canal in the Faida district of Iraq's Kurdistan region. Morandi Bonacossi said that the Faida canal appears to have been built by Assyrian king Sargon for local irrigation, but it became part of a much larger canal network established by Sennacherib. Sargon, who ruled from 722 B.C. until 705 B.C., is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, where he is said to have defeated the Kingdom of Israel in an invasion. He was the father of his successor Sennacherib, who ruled until 681 B.C. and rebuilt the ancient city of Nineveh alongside the Tigris River, on the outskirts of modern Mosul. [Source: Tom Metcalfe, Live Science, July 15, 2022]

Sennacherib's canals transformed the core regions of the Assyrian Empire from relatively dry farms into highly productive irrigation agricultural areas. "These irrigation networks with their associated monuments were part of highly structured, centrally planned and elite-sponsored programs that engineered the landscape of the Assyrian core," he said. Vandalism, looting and urban expansion — including the construction of a modern aqueduct nearby — now threaten the Faida archaeological site; it is now the subject of a salvage project to document the carvings, protect them and create an archaeological park nearby.

Politics of Irrigation in Assyria

Daniel Weiss wrote in Archaeology magazine: The canal and relief panels at Faida were all sculpted out of naturally occurring bedrock and ran along the side of a low hill. The plain below the canal is thought to have been home to a number of Neo-Assyrian villages inhabited largely by herders who tended sheep and goats and farmers who grew olives and grapes in the hills and wheat and barley on the plains. These farmers depended on the steady supply of water provided by the Faida canal and other irrigation projects in the area. Their crops were essential to feeding the appetites of residents of the nearby Assyrian capitals at Khorsabad, which was founded by Sargon II, and Nineveh. “These hydraulic systems allowed the Assyrian imperial administration to significantly increase the agricultural productivity of the area,” says Morandi Bonacossi, “and it became a sort of granary for Assyria.” The goal of the Faida reliefs, he points out, was to play up the king’s privileged relationship to the gods, a relationship that allowed him to carry out such important irrigation projects. “The reliefs are telling the local people to remember that all this was made possible by the king,” Morandi Bonacossi says, “and that he is the one to whom they owe the fertility of their land.” [Source: Daniel Weiss, Archaeology magazine, May-June 2020]

Mesopotamian map of canals

Jason Ur, a Harvard University landscape archaeologist who has studied Neo-Assyrian irrigation systems and rock monuments in the area, notes that most Neo-Assyrian reliefs were located in palaces or temples, which would have been accessible only to the elite, or at the edge of the empire, placed there as a warning to neighboring kingdoms. The Faida reliefs, by contrast, would have been seen by local farmers every time they came to the canal to open the sluice gates and water their fields. “This would have been a really powerful reminder to the 99 percent that the kings were there, they were divinely chosen, and they were powerful,” says Ur. Given that the reliefs unearthed at Faida thus far extend over more than a mile of the canal’s length, and that all 10 of them depict exactly the same tableau, Ur suggests they were intended to ensure that people living or farming at different points along the canal all received the same message: “You’re living in Assyria and you’re under the rule of the king of Assyria, who is the representative on Earth of these gods, and most importantly, of Ashur.”

Many of these local residents, Ur says, may have been among those forcibly moved to the Assyrian heartland after having been conquered—a population that the king might have seen as in particular need of indoctrination into the Assyrian worldview. “It would have been important to convey these sorts of non-textual messages to people who may not have felt a cultural or ethnic connection to the land they found themselves in,” says Ur. “Maybe they identified themselves as Israelites or Iranians or people from Anatolia.” The origins of the population in the immediate vicinity of the canal are unknown, but at a site called Tell Gomel, some 30 miles to the southeast, Morandi Bonacossi has excavated a number of cremation burials—a non-Assyrian practice—interred with typical Neo-Assyrian grave goods. “This might suggest the presence of foreigners,” he says, “of deportees who were captured during Assyrian military campaigns and resettled in Assyria.” Once ensconced in their new homes, they were no doubt regularly informed that their well-being was now in the hands of Ashur, who had started out as the god of a single city and now presided, along with his able representative, the Assyrian king, over the largest empire the world had ever seen.

Decline of Irrigation and the Decline of Ancient Mesopotamian Civilization

Claude Hermann and Walter Johns wrote in the Encyclopedia Britannica:“Irrigation was indispensable. If the irrigator neglected to repair his dyke, or left his runnel open and caused a flood, he had to make good the damage done to his neighbours' crops, or be sold with his family to pay the cost. The theft of a watering-machine, water-bucket or other agricultural implement was heavily fined. [Source: Claude Hermann Walter Johns, Babylonian Law — The Code of Hammurabi. Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1910-1911]

The Mesopotamia kingdoms were ravaged by wars and hurt by changing watercourse and the salinization of farmland. In the Bible the Prophet Jeremiah said Mesopotamia’s “cities are a desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness, a land wherein no man dwelleth, neither doth any son of man pass thereby." Today wolves scavenge in the wastelands outside of Ur.

The early Mesopotamian civilizations are believed to have fallen because salt accruing from irrigated water turned fertile land into a salt desert. Continuous irrigation raised the ground water, capillary action — the ability of a liquid to flow against gravity where liquid spontaneously rises in a narrow space such as between grains of sand and soil — brought the salts to the surface, poisoning the soil and make it useless for growing wheat. Barley is more salt resistant than wheat. It was grown in less damaged areas. The fertile soil turned to sand by drought and the changing course of the Euphrates that today is several miles away from Ur and Nippur.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Mesopotamia sourcebooks.fordham.edu , National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, especially Merle Severy, National Geographic, May 1991 and Marion Steinmann, Smithsonian, December 1988, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated July 2024