Water
supply and irrigation were vital elements in the development of civilisation and
freemasonry was the source of the necessary skills and ingenuity.
The rise of civilisation
It
is significant that when the first two advanced civilisations emerged in the
ancient Near East, both were located in fertile river valleys that were
surrounded by vast tracts of desert. These were the regions occupied by the
Empires of Mesopotamia in the wide alluvial plains of the Tigris and Euphrates
Rivers and by the pharaonic Kingdoms of Egypt in the valley of the Nile River.
Both civilisations were founded on irrigation and the regions they occupied are
usually described as the “twin cradles of civilisation”. Since
then, the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers have changed their courses dramatically,
so that most of the early cities that flourished along their banks are now only
isolated ruins in the desert. In contrast, the ancient course of the Nile River
is virtually unchanged. Each of these two civilisations devised calendars and
invented methods of writing independently, but almost simultaneously, from which
our modern calendars and alphabets were derived. These events were the
precursors of advanced civilisation. Although these two civilisations developed
in isolation, trading between them seems to have been established about 4,000
years ago.
The
rise of advanced civilisations in Mesopotamia and Egypt exemplifies the way that
primitive societies always seem to have approached life, which was to adopt the
line of least resistance until forced into some other course of action. For
example, those hunter-gatherers who lived in fertile temperate regions or
tropical rainforests, where wild game abounded and fruit and vegetables were
available in their natural state, had a comparatively easy way of life and
usually showed little inclination to improve their standard of living. They
tended instead to continue with their frugal though comparatively relaxed
day-to-day existence, as many still do. During extended periods of inhospitable
climate, when the naturally available foodstuffs fell below the basic level for
subsistence, the indigenous hunter-gatherers usually migrated to regions with a
more favourable climate without attempting to develop survival skills in
agriculture and animal husbandry. However, when those skills had been acquired,
they sometimes stimulated sufficient interest and impetus to initiate the
evolution of a more advanced civilisation. These appear to have been the
conditions that prevailed in the countries around the Mediterranean Sea at the
end of the last great Ice Age, which precipitated the growth of civilisation in
Mesopotamia and Egypt, the first two great civilisations about which we have
extensive knowledge.
The empires of Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia
is a Greek name signifying “the land between the rivers”. The
alluvial plains of this region are confined between the Anatolian Plateau to the
north, the rugged Zagros Mountains to the east, the hostile Syrian Desert to the
south and the Lebanon Mountains and semi-arid Negeb to the west. It was the
homeland of the ancient civilisations of Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria. In
the uplands to the north and northeast, the climate is suitable and the rainfall
is adequate for the land to be cultivated successfully without irrigation, which
is in stark contrast to the flood plains to the south where agriculture cannot
succeed without irrigation. The Late Hunters entered the uplands more than
10,000 years ago and constructed round huts of wood. After many generations
clusters of round huts of compacted mud replaced the wooden huts. In ancient
Jarmo in northern Assyria, about 200 kilometres southeast of Nineveh, the early
houses were built of clay and plastered with mud, when the head of the Persian
Gulf was about 150 kilometres further north than it is now. About 10,000 years
ago the early dwellings built on the southern flood plains, at the head of the
Persian Gulf, were flimsy semi-conical structures of reed plastered with mud. By
about that time the Late Hunters had learnt to herd and breed the wild sheep,
goats and gazelles found on the slopes of the Zagros Mountains. They had also
begun to cultivate the wild cereals found in the region, which introduced
agriculture to the inhabitants of Mesopotamia.
As
the Late Hunters mastered the art of food production, they also began to
construct permanent villages in the northern foothills and plains, which
gradually spread to the rich flood plains in the south. By then mud bricks had
replaced the mud and clay used for construction, from which the “beehive”
houses developed at Khirokitia in Cyprus. In the northern uplands, where stone
was readily available, houses were also being constructed with stone
foundations. The next development was to replace circular houses with
rectangular houses, which are more suitable for village development. Large
groups of rectangular houses that were packed together and had common walls,
with access from their flat roofs, were developed at Çatal Hüyük in Turkey.
Larger two-storey developments of a similar style, but built back to back with
entrances from narrow lanes at ground level, were constructed at Hacilar in
Turkey. Thereafter building construction developed steadily and the use of stone
became more prevalent. A good example of the early development of masonry
structures is the fortified settlement at Dimini in Greece, constructed about
6,000 years ago, which is one of the earliest towns known in Europe. The inner
settlement is surrounded by six concentric walls of undressed limestone, which
form a series of narrow passages and gates probably for defence. In some
sections the external walls were constructed as a series of arcs, while in other
sections they were buttressed or provided with quoined revetments for structural
strength. By 5,000 years ago well-finished and well-furnished dwellings were
being constructed entirely of stone at Skara Brae, in the Orkney Islands. The
inhabitants were farmers who lived there for several hundred years until driven
out by deteriorating climatic conditions. From whence the farmers came and where
they went is not known.
It
is not known when the flood plains of the “fertile crescent”
were first irrigated, but there is evidence that the prehistoric Ubaidan people,
who settled in Mesopotamia about 6,500 years ago, were proficient in directing
the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers onto the fields as and when
required. When the Sumerians arrived in Mesopotamia about 500 years later, a
network of small irrigation channels crisscrossed the deep alluvial soil in the
south. An extensive system of lakes and swamps developed at the head of the
Persian Gulf, where the waters from the canals flowed out onto the low-lying
land. In the course of time dense thickets of reeds proliferated in these swamps
and lakes. Progressively through the ages the swamps and lakes expanded and
combined to form the extensive marshes that exist today, teeming with fish and
waterfowl. The progressive accumulation of silt in the headwaters of the Persian
Gulf is as much a result of sediment carried by the water discharged from
irrigation canals, as it is from the deltaic effect of the rivers.
When
the smelting and casting of copper in the Near East was established about 6,500
years ago and the kiln firing bricks followed about 5,500 years ago, Mesopotamia
was the undisputed centre of advanced civilisation in the Levant and the Near
East. Remarkable as these advances were, Mesopotamia’s ultimate destiny was
achieved through the activities of the small trading city of Assur, on the west
bank of the Tigris River, about 100 kilometres south of Nineveh. The original
capital of Assyria was Assur, when the Assyrians were subject to Sumer and later
intermittently to Babylonia. They mainly adopted the Sumerian religion and
structure of society. The first Assyrian capital was Ashur, but ultimately was
moved to Ninevah. The Assyrian empire grew from about 2500 BCE until
612 BCE, when its rule extended from the Caspian Sea to Egypt. The Tigris
and Euphrates Rivers not only provided the water for irrigation, but also became
the main arteries of communication in ancient Mesopotamia. The established
system of river transport was the basis on which Mesopotamia developed its trade
routes by sea using dhows. This trade began more than 5,000 years
ago and expanded as far eastwards as the Indus River basin on the Indian
subcontinent, when Bahrain was an important entrepot port. Sumerian texts record
that this sea trade continued for at least 1,000 years. They record in detail
the woollen and linen textiles, leather goods, oil and dried fish exported to
the Indus River basin and also show that copper was one of the principal imports
from there.
Some
time earlier than 4,600 years ago Mesopotamia had also established overland
trade routes through Iran to eastern Afghanistan. It terminated in the province
of Badakhshan on the northern slopes of the Hindu Kush Mountains, which then was
the major source of lapis lazuli. It is now known that copper mined in
Afghanistan to the north of Kabul, but on the southern slopes of the Hindu Kush
Mountains in the Indus River basin, was transported by land through Badakhshan
as well as by sea. One of the Mesopotamian tin sources, referred to as Melukhkha
in the Sumerian records, only recently has been positively identified as the
Sarkar valley, on the common boundary of the provinces of Herat and Farah in
western Afghanistan. It is very close to the border of Iran and near one of the
established land trade routes from Badakhshan. The location of an ore body, from
which the metal in artefacts and other a manufactured objects has been obtained,
can be determined accurately by complex testing techniques. This is done by
comparing detailed analyses of samples obtained from the object and from the
possible ore sources. The existence of these ancient trade routes, overland and
by sea, strongly supports the hypothesis that the Sumerians were migrants from
the Far East, probably about the time of the earliest flooding of Sundaland, the
immense drowned archipelago once a part of Southeast Asia. Stephen Oppenheimer
examines this aspect in his book Eden in the East, which is
subtitled the Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia.
The
careful planning and timing necessary to manage the irrigation, planting and
harvesting of crops, coupled with the maintenance of records to control the
production and supply of products to distant purchasers and the importation of
goods in return, must have provided the incentive for the Chaldeans at Ur to
devise a calendar and for the Sumerians at Uruk to invent writing. Both of these
events took place in southern Mesopotamia about 5,200 years ago. The original
Chaldean calendar almost certainly had a lunar basis, probably with thirteen
months of twenty-eight days. Later it was changed to reflect the solar year and
had twelve months of thirty days, with an additional month every sixth year to
realign the calendar with the seasons. Still later the calendar was again
modified, having twelve months alternately thirty and twenty-nine days long,
with an additional month added at the end of every third year. The Babylonian
year commenced with Nisän at the spring equinox. The Israelites were accustomed
to using this calendar during their Babylonish captivity, so they adopted it as
their own calendar when they returned to Jerusalem.
The Sumerians first used a
pictographic script in about 3200 BCE, which they had modified to the
ideograms of their cuneiform script by about 2800 BCE. The script is called
cuneiform from the Latin cuneus meaning a wedge,
because its letters are the wedge-shaped imprints of a reed stylus on wet clay.
The construction of sentences using Sumerian pictographs differed significantly
from the sentence structure using Egyptian hieroglyphs, as discussed later.
There is archaeological evidence revealing that the Sumerian script would not
have been devised specifically for the Sumerian language, but probably was
adapted from a system of writing borrowed from some earlier literate people,
although texts that clearly belong to those earlier people have yet been found.
There were at least 500 Sumerian ideograms in use, each of which represented a
concept or a thing, although the meaning could not be deduced from the outline.
Ideograms were used for all common words and additional phonemes were also used
to represent syllables, so that sentences spoken in any language could be
transcribed to give the exact meaning instead of only conveying the basic
concepts. This script soon spread to Assyria and thence to Egypt, but it was not
the basis of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. From 3,500 years ago or even earlier, an
Akkadianised form of the script was the lingua franca of the Near
East and Egypt, which continued to be used in commerce for more than 1,000
years.
The oldest alphabet of which we
have a record in script form, as distinct from the Egyptian hieroglyphs, was
derived from the Sumerian phonemes to imitate the system more economically. That
alphabet appeared in the Canaanite city of Ugarit, in Syria, in about 1500 BCE.
Because of the Semitic influence it then had twenty-nine consonants with no
vowels, which the Phoenicians adapted as an alphabet of twenty-two letters that
emerged in Byblos in about 1200 BCE. When the Greeks introduced vowels the
Phoenician adaptation of the Sumerian script became the direct ancestor of all
modern alphabets. The deciphering of the Sumerian cuneiform script by Sir Henry
Creswicke Rawlinson (1810-1895) and his translation of Darius’s inscription on
the Behistun Rock, about 30 kilometres from the ancient Persian city of
Persepolis, is described by William Ryan and Walter Pitman in Noah’s
Flood, subtitled The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event
That Changed History. Rawlinson’s pioneering work enabled the Sumerian
epic of Gilgamesh to be translated. The system of cuneiform
writing and the shared tradition of the scribal craft were the main factors
holding the different peoples of Mesopotamia together, which also ensured that
their history was preserved for thousands of years. The many important
developments in mathematics and astronomy that the Greeks made were based on the
earlier discoveries of Mesopotamian scholars, but there is a tendency to
overlook the importance of the foundations laid by the Mesopotamian.
When the Mesopotamian villages in
the north were small and scattered they were able produce adequate crops without
irrigation, but this was not possible after they had grown into large towns.
Limestone is readily available in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, which
could be used to construct buildings, irrigation structures and fortifications
in the northern towns as they expanded. This was in contrast with the southern
flood plains that are devoid of rock, where compacted soils and mud brick were
the only materials available to construct buildings and irrigation structures
until kiln-fired bricks were developed. The summer flows in the northern rivers
became inadequate as the population of the towns increased, necessitating the
provision of a reliable supply of pure water for drinking, as well as water in
sufficient volume to meet the increasing demands of irrigation. These probably
became the most pressing of the many problems that had to be overcome during
civic development. Successive rulers tapped the available sources of water in
the foothills that formed arcs around the larger towns. It is fortunate that
historical records of many of these important developments have been preserved
in sculptures and inscriptions. Many books describe the history and development
of civilisation in the Near East, but those of special interest include The
First Empires by Nicholas Postgate, From Village to
Empire by Charles Burney and Crossroads of Civilization by
Clive Irving.
When Assur-nasir-apli II (883-859 BCE)
refounded the ancient town of Kalhu on the eastern bank of the Tigris River, it
became the city called Nimrud and was established as the capital of Assyria.
Assur-nasir-apli II constructed a canal from the River Zab to augment the
inadequate water supply obtained from the Tigris River. Nimrud continued to be
the royal residence until Sargon was king from 721 BC to 705 BCE and
built a new capital, Khorsabad, further to the north. Khorsabad was a
substantial fortified town, some distance to the east of the Tigris River, which
necessitated the provision of yet another major water supply. When Sargon’s
son Sennacherib succeeded him as king from 704 BCE to 681 BCE, the
Assyrian capital was moved to its fourth and final location at Nineveh, also on
the eastern bank of the Tigris River. Nineveh was a much larger city and is
estimated to have had a population of at least 120,000. As a consequence
Sennacherib had to construct an even more comprehensive water supply than that
of Nimrud.
The various works carried out in
the foothills of the Zagros Mountains to meet the needs of water supplies for
the towns, as well as to irrigate extensive agricultural and horticultural
developments in the districts surrounding them, are typified by Sennacherib’s
developments at Nineveh, which are eloquently described in his own words on one
of the many inscriptions that he had carved in stone:
“To
give these waters a course through the steep mountains, I cut through the
difficult places with pickaxes and directed their outflow to the plain of
Nineveh . . . I had all of the orchards watered in the hot season . . . Within
the orchards, more than in their native habitat, the vine, every fruit-bearing
tree and herbs throve luxuriously . . . The mulberry and cypress, the product of
the orchards, the reeds of the brakes in the swamps I cut down and used them as
desired in the building of my royal palaces. The wool-bearing trees (cotton)
they sheared and wove the wool into garments . . .”
Sennacherib’s development included a large aqueduct from
Bavian through Jerwan to augment the Khosr River that joined the Tigris River at
Nineveh. He also built a dam on the Khosr River northeast of Nineveh to divert
its waters into an artificial swamp used as a reservoir. The aqueduct from
Bavian was a remarkable piece of Assyrian engineering, complete with flood
spillways and sluices with boat shaped piers to streamline the flow. Much of its
length was excavated in solid rock, but elsewhere it was constructed in fine
rustic masonry with the base sealed with bitumen. The stones were rough dressed
with a square cross-section and in various lengths to suit their specific use.
The walls were massive and vertical, with buttresses at regular intervals. The
aqueduct stonework was supported on a series of massive ogival arches
when crossing wadis. The ogival arches were filled
with rock to withstand the force of flash floods. At least one complete
structure has survived to the present day, which proves that the Assyrians had
mastered the structural technique of arches once thought to have been introduced
by the Romans several centuries later.
In the course of time tribes from
the Iranian plateau joined the first agriculturists in the “fertile
crescent” and learnt their techniques over many generations. When the
Iranian tribes returned to their homeland to establish an agricultural society,
the supply of water was a major problem, ultimately solved in about 750 BCE
by an ingenious development called the qanat system, first used in
Urartu between the Zagros Mountains and Lake Urmia on the northern plateau of
Iran. It is recorded that King Rusa himself designed a marvellous water supply
and irrigation system for the town of Ulhu. This is the earliest known
application of the qanat system, which has been in continual use
ever since it was constructed about 2,700 years ago. The qanat
system makes use of underground springs and aquifers that are tapped by
constructing tunnels having an outfall gradient of about 1 in 100, thus
controlling the velocity of the water so that both erosion and sedimentation are
kept within manageable limits.
Access for construction of the qanat
tunnels was gained by sinking deep shafts at intervals of 100 metres or so along
the tunnel line. The tunnels were often up to 100 kilometres long and discharged
at suitable points on the plains, usually into some form of storage reservoir,
which allowed water to be drawn off as required. An important benefit of the qanat
system is that it reduces evaporation to a minimum when conveying water over
long distances in an arid climate. When the system is in service, the shafts are
used as access for maintenance and also as wells from which water is drawn and
discharged into subsidiary canals to irrigate the intervening areas. The qanat
system was introduced into other Islamic countries as recently as during the
tenth century. The system is called foggara in Algeria and khettara
in Moorish Spain.
The kingdoms of Egypt
For
countless thousands of years the Nile River has flooded annually and deposited
rich black mud in a narrow and clearly defined strip along each bank. The
Egyptians call these narrow strips of fertile land the Kmt, which
signifies “the Black Land”, in contrast to the otherwise
barren hinterland that they call Dsrt, meaning “the Red
Land”. The man-made residues that remain from the occupation of Egypt
by the nomadic hunter-gatherers of the Old Stone Age, indicate that they were
beginning to settle in villages and had acquired some knowledge of agriculture
about 7,000 years ago. Later, at least 5,200 years ago and possibly earlier, the
Egyptians were practising irrigation. They built levees or embankments to
prevent the river from flooding too widely and cut channels to divert water over
what otherwise was barren land. Because Egypt has a very low rainfall, less than
100 millimetres annually, the Nile has been of the utmost importance to the
Egyptians since prehistoric times. It is their main source of water and the
annual flood must be utilised to the best advantage for their crops.
The
times when the Nile’s water would be available for irrigation and the
scheduling necessary for construction and maintenance of irrigation channels,
coupled with the planting and harvesting of crops, probably provided the
incentive that induced the Egyptians to devise their calendar, possibly as early
as 5,500 years ago. Their year was divided into twelve months of thirty days
each, with a sacred period of five feast days intercalated between the end of
one year and the beginning of the next. The Egyptian year began with Sothis,
the heliacal rising of Sirius, which is the brightest star in the heavens. The
heliacal rising of Sirius was when, after a long period during which Sirius was
not visible in the skies, it was first seen to rise in the east before the sun
rose. Sothis heralded the beginning of spring and was a very
important event, because it usually coincided with the arrival of the annual
flood from Upper Egypt and Nubia.
The
first hieroglyphs are now known to have been in use in Egypt by about 3300 BCE
and in fact they combine three different systems of writing. As with
pictographic scripts generally, each sign represented a word or an idea, but in
addition each sign represented a syllable and also an individual sound that was
used as the letter of an alphabet. Words were often written in two or even three
of the systems simultaneously. There also were signs used as determinatives
to indicate the specific meaning to be attached to a word. Soon after 2800 BCE
the Egyptian hieroglyphs were further developed as a cursive script, called hieratic,
which could be engraved in clay or written with a pen and ink on papyri. This
was the beginning of advanced civilisation of Egypt. The later Egyptian cursive
script evolved by the progressive omission of parts of the hieroglyphic picture,
so that eventually the remaining skeletal vestiges could be written
consecutively without lifting the pen or brush from the paper.
Over
the centuries the characters formed by the skeletal vestiges of the original
pictographs were taken to represent the initial sounds of the words they
represented. This is called the acrophonic principle and it is the basis of all
alphabets. However, the alphabetical characters of the cursive script were not
the same as the hieroglyphs that originally were used as an alphabet. The Hebrew
characters were once thought to have evolved directly from the Egyptian hieratic
alphabet, but modern investigations reveal that the Egyptian hieratic
and the Hebrew characters both have many aspects that are closely related to
early alphabets derived from the Sumerian cunieform. This probably
is the reason why the hieroglyphic and hieratic
alphabetical characters are not the same. The earliest Sinai-Hebrew script dates
from about 1500 BCE.
The
pharaonic Egyptian civilisation was renowned for its preoccupation with eternal
life and left a vast array of temple complexes, pyramids and other funerary
structures. It had a period of great brilliance during the Old Kingdom from
about 4,500 to 4,100 years ago, when the people were exhorted to practise
modesty, discretion, honesty and respect for their elders. The peasants worked
for most of the year on the land, except when the Nile was in flood, when they
were employed on the great building projects of the state, such as the pyramids.
The constant demands of the land had to be met for life to survive, so that the
maintenance of agriculture and the irrigation system was of the utmost
importance. This period of greatness was followed by a period of decline and
decay. There was a period of renewal during the Middle Kingdom, which lasted
from about 4,000 to 3,600 years ago, when the land was gradually resettled and
the irrigation system was restored. A Rosalie David explains these developments
in some detail in The Egyptian Kingdoms. Several of the references
mentioned in other chapters on related aspects also provide relevant
information.
About
3,700 years ago a great engineering feat was accomplished in the Fayoum, a large
basin in the western desert, when the annual inflow from the Nile through the
Bahr Yüsef was reduced and regulated. That allowed some 10,000 hectares of
pastureland to be reclaimed, with the protection of a huge semi-circular
embankment. An existing lake also was adapted to act as a reservoir and dykes
and canals were built to prevent flooding. The pharaonic civilisation reached
its pinnacle with a period of great international power, prestige and wealth
during the New Kingdom from about 3,500 to 3,000 years ago. Nubia was again
brought under Egyptian control, much of Syria and Palestine was conquered and
many magnificent temples and tombs were built at Thebes. After this period of
affluence Egypt suffered continuous internal turmoil and was overrun by
successive invaders, until it became a province of the Persian Empire in 525 BCE.
However, its way of life and deep-seated traditions were not seriously
interfered with and for almost two centuries Egypt existed as a well-managed
Persian satrap, although there were brief periods of uprising by local princes.
When
Alexander the Great reached Egypt in 332 BCE, the Persian satrap
surrendered to him without a struggle and Alexander was accepted as a pharaoh.
He laid the foundations for the future great city of Alexandria, but died
shortly after leaving a four-year old son as his heir. The heir was promptly
murdered and Alexander’s empire was divided among his generals, as a result of
which Egypt became the property of general Ptolemy in 305 BCE. Although the
Ptolemaic period was one of great intellectual achievement, the native Egyptians
suffered severe deprivation and were forced to become intensely regulated tenant
farmers who paid exorbitant taxes. The reign of fifteen Ptolemies and finally
the famous Queen Cleopatra was abruptly terminated when the Roman general
Octavius conquered Egypt in 30 BCE. This brought the Pharaonic Kingdoms to
an end and Egypt became a part of the Roman Empire.
The Indus civilisation
Recent
archaeological investigations reveal that about 9,000 years ago cereals were
growing wild in the Baluchistan foothills, on the north western edge of the
Indus River basin, especially barley and to a lesser extent wheat. Previously
nomadic hunter-gatherers began to cultivate these cereals in the vicinity of
Mehrgarh, about 1,000 years after agriculture began in the “fertile
crescent”, when rice was being cultivated in Thailand. They erected
sturdy houses of mud brick and also grain storage buildings because the growing
season was so short. The rearing of goats, sheep and cattle had replaced hunting
by about 8,000 years ago. However there seems to have been little further
development until during the period from about 6,000 to 5,000 years ago, when
Mesopotamia developed extensive trade with the Indus region.
As
people experienced in farming and animal husbandry migrated from Mesopotamia to
the Indus River basin, prosperous settlements soon appeared in the valley. This
period of prosperity coincided with favourable changes in climate and a
flourishing civilisation had developed by about 4,500 years ago. Although it was
related to the communities of Baluchistan, the Indus civilisation owed its
greater prosperity to the enormous agricultural potential of the rich soils in a
riverine environment, coupled with a good climate and aided by extensive
irrigation. At its zenith the Indus civilisation seems to have been as advanced
as the civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. The development of civilisation
in the Indus River basin and of the associated development in Afghanistan are
discussed in a number of publications referred to in the panorama of archaeology
given in an earlier chapter on that subject. Several references in other
chapters also are relevant.
Mohenjo-Daro
had a peak population of about 40,000 people and was one of the two most
important cities of the Indus civilisation, located on the west bank of the
Indus River about 400 kilometres upstream from the Indian Ocean. The buildings
were constructed almost entirely of kiln-fired bricks, which would have required
an immense outlay of labour and fuel. Of special significance were two huge
granaries, each of which comprised six storage units about 7 metres wide, 17
metres long and 7 metres high. They incorporated large underfloor ventilation
ducts to prevent the grain from rotting and were suitably located to facilitate
loading onto river transport. There were 18 circular threshing or pounding
floors associated with the granaries, each about 3 metres in diameter and
constructed of kiln-fired brick. All houses had brick lined wells and bathrooms,
many with latrines built in. Stormwater and domestic wastewater were carried
away in well-built covered brick drains that ran down all of the main streets.
There also were various civic buildings, including a great bath lined with
asphalt and a large assembly hall. Massive brick walls were provided in
strategic areas to protect the city from the flooding of the Indus River. The
available evidence indicates that the city was abandoned about 3,500 years ago,
after a millennium or more of human exploitation had denuded the vegetation by
deforestation and overgrazing, by which time the extensive irrigation areas had
become tracts of salt encrusted desert.
Irrigation in ancient Afghanistan
A
study of the influence of irrigation on the rise of civilisation would not be
complete without referring to an extensive irrigation system in ancient
Afghanistan. After the ice sheets of the last great Ice Age had receded into
northern Eurasia about 10,000 years ago, large areas of forest spread across the
tundra where herds of wild game had previously wandered. The hunter-gatherers of
Europe then began to move eastwards into the more temperate steppes along the
southern fringes of the forests. They became intensive gatherers of the wild
barley, wheat and legumes growing in the steppes and also captured wild sheep,
goats and gazelles, which they gradually formed into semi-domesticated herds.
These nomadic groups developed into pastoralists as they moved into central
Asia. By about 7,000 years ago they had travelled around the north of the
Caspian Sea and then south into Turkestan, where they began to establish mixed
farms along the southern edge of the Karakumy Desert, within several hundred
kilometres of the north-western border of Afghanistan. At the average rate at
which nomadic pastoralists seem to have migrated, they probably would have
travelled the intervening 1,000 kilometres and reached the Takhar and Kunduz
provinces of Afghanistan, on its north-eastern border with the Soviet republic
of Tadzhikistan, by about 6,000 years ago.
This
region of Afghanistan, which is situated in the northern foothills of the Hindu
Kush Mountains, is semi-arid and it has an elevation that varies from about 500
metres to 1,500 metres. Because it has an annual precipitation less than 250
millimetres, the region is not suitable for intensive agriculture without the
aid of irrigation. The nomadic pastoralists were undeterred when they settled
there and soon developed the first agricultural and pastoral societies of
central Asia, which later spread northwards into the more fertile plains of
Russia. The area settled by the nomads was on the southern terraces in the
central basin of the Amu Darya River, the Oxus River of antiquity. The settled
area extended about 150 kilometres eastwards along the Kundut and Taluqan Rivers
and from there northwards for another 100 kilometres, about half of which was
irrigable land. Mesopotamia’s overland trade route to Afghanistan, that was in
continuous use from about 4,600 years ago until about 3,750 years, ago passed
through the settled area and terminated in the adjacent Badakhshan province.
As
the irrigation works in the settled area were begun at about the same time as
trade commenced, the nomadic pastoralists probably learnt their irrigation
techniques from Mesopotamian migrants, as did the settlers in the Indus River
valley during the same period. At least 75 kilometres of irrigation canals were
in use by 4,200 years ago. The longest canal headed north from the Kokcha River
into the plain of Shortughai and there was another was in the vicinity of
Taluqan. By about 3,800 years ago at least another 75 kilometres of canals had
been constructed, one heading southwards from the Kokcha River into the plain of
Archi and another heading eastwards from the Taluqan River into the plain of
Kunduz. A second ambitious phase of about 150 kilometres of canal, in much more
difficult terrain, was completed about 3,000 years ago. It included a
spectacular diversion channel, the Rud-i Shahrawan, which is up to 30 metres
deep and diverts water northwards from the Taluqan River into the basin of the
Kokcha River, which enabled much of the otherwise inaccessible hinterland to be
irrigated. The Rud-i Shahrawan
canal has been in use continuously ever since it was constructed.
Canals
were added progressively under the later Persian and Greek dominations, when
required to meet increasing irrigation requirements, until all work was brought
to a halt by the invasion of a nomadic people in about 130 BCE. The Kushan
dynasty, which occupied the region from about 35 BCE onwards when the
effects of the invasion had subsided, resumed the policy of extending the
cultivated lands even though it abandoned some of the earlier canals. However it
renewed and extended many of the old canals, as well as constructing at least
another 150 kilometres of new canals. The region experienced its greatest
prosperity from the influx of Islam at the end of the sixth century until the
Mogul invasion in 1220, after which the use of the scheme was precluded for
several centuries. However the traditional knowledge of irrigation, which had
been built up when establishing the ancient canals, was preserved by later
generations and was the basis for all subsequent work in the area. Whenever it
has been necessary to rebuild canals the original alignments have always been
preferred, including the work carried out by the Sumanids in the tenth century,
by the Timurids in the fifteenth century and even in the present century.