Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  The Tigris and the Euphrates both rose in the Anatolian highlands of modern Turkey. The Euphrates started southwesterly through expanses of desert plateaus before veering sharply southeast to form the top of the funnel-shaped, flat floodplains with the southerly descending Tigris, which itself was replenished with snowmelt and runoff from tributaries flowing out of the Zagros Mountains of western Iran. The two rivers nearly merged in the region of modern Baghdad on the Tigris and ancient Babylon on the Euphrates, then ballooned gently to form the borders of the stoneless, easily farmed, fertile mudflats intersected with oft-shifting river channels of lower Mesopotamia, the biblical location of the Garden of Eden. South of the ancient Sumerian cities of Ur and Uruk, both rivers spilled into a full-fledged marshland rich in fowl, fish, and milk-bearing water buffalo but too swampy for farming. Finally, the rivers discharged their united flow into the Persian Gulf.

  It was in hot, river-rich lower Mesopotamia, where precipitation was too meager for rain-fed farming, that permanent settlements based on large-scale irrigation agriculture first took hold after about 6000 BC. In the fourth millennium, many hundreds of years prior to Menes’ founding of ancient Egypt, it flowered as Sumerian civilization. Everything depended upon mastery of the waters, whose secrets, according to Mesopotamian mythology, were revealed to man by Enki, the kind and wise fertilizing water god. Irrigation transformed Sumeria into a veritable garden, with abundant grains and nut and fruit trees, including the multiuseful date palm, close at hand.

  The Sumerians’ origins remain mysterious. It is suspected that they arrived by sea via the Persian Gulf. Their language was unlike any other known group, with a distinctive grammar and vocabulary. Sumeria was a civilization of walled city-states, each located about 20 miles apart, with their own stock of grain supplies used as payment in commercial transactions. About a dozen gradually rose to prominence. Uruk, just inland of marshes at the head of the Persian Gulf, was by 3400 BC the largest-known city on Earth, with more than two square miles within its walls. Ur, later the home of the biblical Abraham, was a port trading city on a since-vanished branch of the Euphrates with protective moats, canals, two harbors, a towering ziggurat temple in its center, and a population of 20,000 to 30,000.

  Mesopotamia & Fertile Crescent

  In Sumeria begins the original urban revolution, and the civilizing influence of the city throughout history. In every age cities stimulated commerce and markets, the exchange of ideas, the arts, the division of labor, specialization, and the accumulation of surplus for investment that lay at the heart of economic expansion and the rise of great states. The great cities of history were integrally linked to man’s uses of water and were, without fail, situated on rivers, lakes, oases, and seashores. City historian Lewis Mumford observes that “the first efficient means of mass transport, the waterway” was the most “dynamic component of the city, without which it could not have continued to increase in size and scope and productivity.” For ancient Sumerian city-states, the waterway provided the economic lifeline that brought copper and tin to make bronze, stone, timber, and other vital raw materials absent in Mesopotamia. Sumerian vessels traded long-distance with Egypt via the Red Sea and plied the gulf and the Indian Ocean at least to the ancient Indus River civilization, known in written Sumerian records as Meluhha, from which they acquired beads of carnelian and lapis lazuli, timber, gold, and ivory.

  The vital economic activity of the earliest Sumerian city-states, however, was irrigation agriculture. Each had its own farm work gangs comprised of many hundreds of farmers who worked large tracts of land that was owned, rented, or bequeathed by the gods. As in Egypt, coerced labor was done under schedules and regulations set by temple priests, who alone possessed the skills for calculating the changes of season, designing canals, and coordinating mass, collective effort. The religious provenance of the priesthood legitimized their taking large shares of the annual harvest surpluses for storage in the temple granaries.

  Violent, unpredictable floods that destroyed waterworks and entire cities were an omnipresent, terrifying menace. Indeed, in Mesopotamian mythology the quasi-divine status of kings and the state’s political legitimacy itself sprang from a purifying great flood sent by the gods to obliterate humanity and from whose watery chaos a new world order was born. The region’s flood myth centered on a single, forewarned family that survived by building an ark—the progenitor of strikingly similar stories in Hindu mythology and the Noah story in Genesis. Mesopotamia’s flood myth also reflected an acute awareness of water’s precariously dual nature as both potential life-giver and great destroyer, as well as the king’s obligation to avert floods while ensuring ample water for irrigation.

  Farming in Sumeria started around the tributaries and main stem of the Euphrates, which was slower moving, easier to control, and richer in nutrient-bearing silt, and had a wider floodplain, than the Tigris. The higher-elevation Euphrates at first used the Tigris as an overflow drain for waters that fed through the network of primary and secondary canals that fed irrigation to the crops. Eventually, some of the wider irrigation canals were made large enough to carry ships and barges. Crops were grown on miles-long earthen embankments set amid the watery plain between the rivers and controlled by a matrix of dams, dikes, weirs, sluices, and ditches. One benefit of this arduous, artificial irrigation was that it permitted year-round, multicrop farming that yielded larger stockpiles than Egypt’s single-crop basin system. Yet artificial irrigation also came with a terrible side effect that afflicted civilizations throughout history—salinization of the soil.

  Contemplating the desolate, scrubby modern landscape of lower Mesopotamia, the twentieth-century excavator of Ur, British archaeologist Leonard Woolley, puzzled over what had happened to the former brilliant civilization: “Why…if Sumer was once a vast granary, has the population dwindled to nothing, the very soil lost its virtue?” The answer, determined Woolley’s successors, was that increased salt accumulations in the poorly drained soil had depleted its fertility and the ecosystem foundation of Mesopotamian civilization. Over time, intensive irrigation farming had environmental side effects that undermined its sustainability. It tended to raise the level of groundwater to waterlog the soils, while water’s capillary action drew deadly salt toward plant roots. Evaporation, which was especially rapid in hot, arid Mesopotamia, left the telltale crusted salt residue across the once-fertile surface—crop yields fell until finally little at all could grow. Mesopotamian tablets from 1800 BC duly record “black fields becoming white.” To cope with salinization, the Sumerians shifted production from wheat to more-salt-resistant barley. In about 3500 BC, equal amounts of wheat and barley were being grown in Sumeria. A thousand years later, only 15 percent of the crop was wheat. By 1700 BC almost no wheat was being grown, and yields from both crops had declined by some 65 percent over seven centuries.

  World history is replete with societal declines and collapses caused by soil salinization. Ancient Egypt was spared crippling soil salinization and waterlogging only because the Nile’s propitious seasonal flooding and sloping valley drained away excess water and most salts in a timely manner. A second man-made environmental depletion also exacerbated Mesopotamia’s agricultural crisis—deforestation. Wherever humans have settled on Earth, they have chopped down trees—for fuel, houses, boats, tools, and agricultural-land clearance—until their habitats were denuded. Many now-barren parts of Mesopotamia, as elsewhere in the neighboring Mediterranean rim, were once luxuriously verdant. Deforestation made landscapes drier and less fertile. It reduced rainfall as well as the capacity of the soil to retain what did fall. More of the fertile topsoil washed away in torrential downpours—a malevolent expression of water’s power as history’s greatest soil mover, surpassed only by modern industrial man himself.

  In Sumeria the intersection of rising population and depleting agricultural resources finally created an unstable equilibrium wherein all easily irrigable cropland came under cultivation and the boundaries of city-states be
gan to bump up against one another. Centuries of border conflicts over irrigation supplies and cropland resulted, including the world’s first recorded water war, fought intermittently with several arbitrated temporary settlements from 2500 to 2350 BC, between neighboring city-states Umma and Lagash. The war seems to have been started by upriver Umma, first by seizing disputed land for cultivation and then by breeching irrigation canals from a branch of the Euphrates. It was ultimately won by Lagash, whose preserved tablets provide history’s only account of the story. A decisive breakthrough for Lagash was its construction of an irrigation channel that gave it an independent water supply from the Tigris, and the ability to divert canal water supplying parts of Umma.

  The first signs of disintegration of southern Mesopotamian civilization had become visible as early as 3000 to 2800 BC, following an abrupt, disastrous shift in the Euphrates—archaeologists aren’t sure if it occurred naturally or inadvertently by man’s waterworks. The river’s course change displaced the water supply of prominent city-states, intensifying their life-and-death competition for water. Ultimate resolution of Sumerian city-states’ contentious water and cropland challenges came from outside Sumeria—in the form of military conquest and unification by an upriver Semitic dynasty founded by a commoner who rose to power, Sargon of Akkad.

  By legend, Sargon, who ruled from about 2334 BC, had a prestigious water pedigree: as an abandoned baby, he had been set to float in a basket along the river and found by a gardener—a mythic foundling-water motif later adopted in the Exodus story of Moses and in ancient Rome of the twins Romulus and Remus. He usurped power from a city-state king he had served meritoriously, raised an army, defeated the whole of Sumeria, and, like Egypt’s Menes some eight centuries before him, created the region’s first large, unified state. Its center was Akkad, a new city north of lower Mesopotamia whose location today is unknown, but may lie buried under modern Baghdad. Sargon’s empire absorbed Sumerian high culture and invigorated it with a centralized military and political system in which former city-state rulers became governors loyal to him, now exalted as a semidivine king of kings. Cultivation of wheat and barley expanded to unspoiled lands upriver, and agricultural estates were granted to loyal allies. Irrigation works were a vital lever of his political authority. A new system of taxation—whose effectiveness was an unfailing measure of state power throughout history—was implemented by which local farming income flowed to the central bureaucracy to solidify the empire. To obtain metals, timber, and other vital resources not readily available in muddy Mesopotamia, he traded with distant societies and waged military action in the Levant. Excavated large Akkadian cities fit the classic, hydraulic state pattern: large granaries of barley and wheat delivered by farm carts along paved roads, central state distribution of carefully measured rations of staples like grain and oil according to jobs performed and to age, and a central acropolis linking the states to the deities.

  Successful as it was, Sargon’s Akkadian empire lasted only a century, collapsing about the same time as Egypt’s Old Kingdom. While ancient legend attributed the collapse to “The Curse of Akkad” caused by an abomination one of Sargon’s heirs committed against the preeminent god of air and storm, Enlil, modern science has identified another explanation: regional climate change—the prolonged arid and cold period that gripped the Mediterranean area at the time. Regional climate change would also help explain the collapse of Egypt’s Old Kingdom during the same period. Archaeological soil evidence from the site of a major lost city in north Akkad has revealed that drought was so severe in one dirt layer corresponding to 2200 to 1900 BC that even the earthworms had perished.

  After a chaotic interval, imperial restoration was briefly achieved by southerly Ur. Records show, however, that despite the expansion of waterworks, Ur’s fragile revival was constantly menaced by poor barley harvests, floods, and neighboring enemies. Much later it was entirely abandoned to the desert sands, when the Euphrates changed course away from its walls and the gulf coast receded.

  Reunification returned upriver to an enlarged area after two centuries under a powerful new dynasty centered in Babylon, on the Euphrates. The greatest of the Babylonian kings was Hammurabi, who ruled for forty-two years after inheriting the throne in 1792 BC. Befitting the expectations of kingship of the era, Hammurabi proclaimed himself the divine “provider of abundant waters for his people” who “heaps the granaries full of grain” and strived to validate his legitimacy by delivering both. In the early part of his reign, he dedicated himself to the smallest details of essential internal developments, such as digging irrigation canals and fortifying cities.

  In the latter part of his reign, especially while establishing full dominance over Mesopotamia after 1766 BC, Hammurabi also used water as a political tool and a military weapon. To win loyalty and revive the old Sumerian heartland he had just conquered, for instance, he built a canal to serve its leading city-states. To subdue his great enemy city-state, Eshnunna, on a tributary of the Tigris near modern Baghdad, he dammed the river upstream and then released it in a devastating torrent. Withholding Euphrates River water was another weapon used with such deadly force by his son to subdue rebellious cities, including Nippur, Ur, and Larsa, that farmland in the far south turned to barren steppes and did not recover; the diversions proved difficult to reverse, causing many of the land’s inhabitants to migrate north.

  Hammurabi is most renowned in history for the world’s first written public code of justice—pithily summarized as “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”—which was inscribed on a seven-foot-high stone stele erected in Babylon’s main temple. The 282 laws of the Code of Hammurabi illuminated the conditions and primary concerns of ancient Babylonia. Prominent among them was water. Many laws dealt with the individual responsibilities for the operation of irrigation dams and canals, with penalties that reflected their critical importance to the order of Babylonian society. For example, Law 53 read: “If anyone be too lazy to keep his dam in proper condition, and does not keep it so; if then the dam break and all the fields be flooded, then shall he in whose dam the break occurred be sold for money and the money shall replace the corn which he has caused to be ruined.” Laws 236, 237, and 238 dealt with the restitution due by a negligent boatman to the owners of lost cargo or a sunken vessel. Hammurabi’s code also encompassed some political protections of the private property rights and contracts of merchants, whose trading activities brought needed goods to Mesopotamia, and a surprising many on the rights of women whose arranged marriages weren’t working out.

  Hammurabi’s five successors ruled from central Mesopotamia for 155 years. The subsequent centuries, however, were filled with regional upheaval, headlined by two great waves of barbarian invasion. The first was associated with the Bronze Age charioteers; the second, which subsided after 1100 BC, with the Iron Age invaders. Iron—and its later, harder cousin, steel—was one of world history’s most transforming innovations, comparable in impact to electricity or the computer silicon chip in modern times. As with these modern inventions and many other industrial technologies, iron production depended crucially upon skillful use of freshwater. Iron-making technologies that began in the Caucasus Mountains around 1500 BC were mastered in nearby northern Syria. Unlike the bronze alloy of copper and tin that was easily smelted at the temperatures of ordinary fire, iron ores required firing from much-hotter-burning charcoal. The absorption of carbon created “steeled iron,” which became famously hard when quenched red hot in water. Yet the quenching had to be skillfully interrupted in order to prevent too-rapid cooling that would result in a uselessly brittle metal.

  Hard iron weapons and tools dramatically changed the military and economic balances of power. Bronze Age empires everywhere were overthrown. States that mastered and applied iron became the great powers of the new age. Foremost among these was the Assyrian Empire, which, during its peak between 744 and 612 BC, consolidated power throughout the Fertile Crescent as far as Egypt. Following the upriver trajectory of
Mesopotamian history, Assyria’s heartland was in the north, on the Tigris near modern Mosul, then a wilderness region with ample rainfall in which lions still roamed. The Assyrians were infamous for their bloodthirsty and relentless military campaigns in which their armies “gleaming in purple and gold” came down upon their enemies “like a wolf on the fold,” as poet Lord Byron put it. Yet their success also rested on an arsenal of masterful hydraulic projects executed with martial discipline, precision, and iron tools, including some innovations and achievements that make them among the greatest water movers in history. The Assyrians were prolific and expert builders of dams, which they used to increase water supply both for irrigation and the domestic needs of their large cities. This was best exemplified by the formidable hydraulic works undertaken by King Sennacherib, who ruled from 704 to 681 BC, to increase the water supply needed to expand his luxurious, double-walled capital city at Nineveh, with its 15 great gates, and its surrounding plantations of fruit trees and exotic flora, including the water-thirsty cotton plant, which the Assyrians called the “wool-bearing tree.”