From our earliest ancestors who created irrigation canals by scratching the ground to channel the water of a stream, to the appearance of the first technology, from the great engineering projects of Mesopotamia and China to the blossoming of the first great cities — civilization and hydraulics have always advanced hand-in-hand.
In numerous ancient civilizations, the legitimacy of those who govern — both in their own eyes and in those of the governed — rests on the social utility of their hydraulic projects. Technique and society are indissolubly linked.
Hammurabi of Babylon, conqueror of all of Mesopotamia, proclaims himself “lord of the city of Uruk” and immediately adds, as if to ensure the legitimacy of this domination, that it was he who “allocated to these people the water of prosperity”. He nonetheless owed his power to his weaponry — and to diplomacy. Yahdun Lim at Mari made the same kind of claim, as did many other leaders of the land of Sumer, all of whom associated the legitimacy of their power and the glory of their reign with the hydraulic projects that they had effected.
A thousand years later, when Cyrus the Great entered Babylon, he legitimized his power in “raising the brick banks lining the city’s ditches”. Alexander, another great historical figure, acts no differently after having occupied Mesopotamia when he ensures that the canals are maintained and tears down the dams the Persians had constructed to block navigation. These technical acts are tantamount to acts of coronation. Was not the legend that grew up around Yu the Great, the pacifier of the Yellow River, the very legitimization of central power in China? We have seen so clearly that in this land it was often hydraulic catastrophes that caused the fall of dynasties. In ancient Egypt, whose cultural and political stability make it somewhat of a special case, the sovereign is, even here, identified with the river from which all blessings come.
