The city of Ugarit, on the northern Syrian coast (several kilometers to the north of the present-day Lattaquieh), has been occupied since very early times. It served as a maritime port for trade with Cyprus and Crete in the context of commerce among Mesopotamia, Mari, Aleppo, Ebla and the Mediterranean, and then as a port of the Hittite Empire of Anatolia. The city knew a period of great prosperity from the IInd millennium BC until its final destruction in 1200 BC by the Sea People. The city is built on high ground, using wells for its primary water supply. As at Mari, rainwater is captured on terraces and brought through gutters and vertical drops to the cisterns of hous — es.[72] The city is surrounded by two small temporary watercourses, the nahr ed-Delbe and the nahr Chbayye, on each of which there is a small dam; the dam on the nahr ed — Delbe is described in detail by Yves Calvet and Bernard Geyer (1994). The originality of this structure resides in its movable beams or stoplogs that can be removed to allow floods to pass. This is the first evidence of such technology that eventually became widespread.
More to the south, on the eastern slopes of the Anti-Lebanon mountains, is the city of Damascus. The city’s water-resource infrastructure is developed toward the middle or end of the IInd millennium BC, under the control of the Arameans. Two canals flow out of the Barada, the perennial river on which Damascus depended from Neolithic times. The system is eventually completed by the Romans and the Arabs (Figure 7.6) and remains operational to this day.
In discussing great cities and their infrastructures we must include Jerusalem. In the 12th or 13th centuries BC the Canaanites constructed a 537-m long tunnel to provide access, during sieges, to a reservoir on the flanks of a hill that is fed by an intermittent spring called Gihon (today called the “fountain of Marie”). Later, around 700 BC, Ezechias tapped this spring through an underground canal feeding a basin to the south of the city, known as the Pool of Siloam.[73]
We have seen that from the 13th century BC the political situation becomes very cloudy in all the Syro-Mesopotamian region. New powers rise to the east and north of the old lands of Sumer and Akkadia, at the foot of the Zagros mountains. The new power centers move from the region of Susa to the east, up the course of the Tigris (Assyria) before returning to the east with the Persians. The incubators of these new powers are valley, hill and mountain regions whose springs and streams can be developed to provide high — quality water for the settlements.
