Hydraulic landscapes and imperial power in the Near East

Abstract

Over the past 20 years archaeological surveys and remote sensing have contributed significantly to the discovery of ancient hydraulic systems in the Middle East. The significance of this increase, namely in the scale and number of canals, conduits and qanats, is examined and related to the role of power and the administration of the later territorial empires which date from the first millennium BC and later. We demonstrate that hydraulic systems spread into the rain-fed zone of northern Iraq, Syria and southern Turkey, especially during the past 3000 years. These systems contributed to the intensification of agricultural production and to the colonization of the Near Eastern landscape.

Sustainably Managing Reservoir Storage: Ancient Roots of a Modern Challenge

“…It is during the period in which empires begin to proliferate that enormous damming and water diversion operations impounded millions of cubic liters of water to feed huge cities with tens of thousands of people and the plants and animals upon which they depended [45]. Many of these features are still visible on the landscape, and many were utilized until relatively recently.…”

2 Assessing the Politics of Neo‐Assyrian Agriculture

“…These physical elements included provincial centers, villages, and fields; irrigation canals, wells, ditches, and dams; as well as extensive road networks (see Wilkinson et al. ; Wilkinson and Rayne ). More than just visual cues of imperial power, however, these infrastructural features also informed subjects’ experience of empire through the vector of agricultural practice itself.…”

“…The material manifestations of agricultural colonization delineated landscapes constructed by Neo-Assyrian engineering, and as such, they demarcated "natural" environments in northern Mesopotamia as political spaces of the Assyrian empire. These physical elements included provincial centers, villages, and fields; irrigation canals, wells, ditches, and dams; as well as extensive road networks (see Wilkinson et al 2005;Wilkinson and Rayne 2010). More than just visual cues of imperial power, however, these infrastructural features also informed subjects' experience of empire through the vector of agricultural practice itself.…”

Regional power and local ecologies: Accumulated population trends and human impacts in the northern Fertile Crescent

“…Moreover, the actions of humans to ameliorate local aridity can result in environmental patterns being reversed: a cautionary example derives from the northern Levant during the reign of Justinian, where the administration of Antioch in the moist north-west requested grain supplies from the climatically marginal region of Hieropolis / Membij (Casana 2003a). This flow of grain from a dry to a relatively moist area is now explained by the fact that the latter area was rendered productive by the extensive use of qanats and water conduits for irrigation (Lawrence and Ricci in press;Wilkinson and Rayne 2010).…”