Category Water Engineering in Ancient Civilizations. 5,000 Years of History

The driving force of this urban development is likely the significant population growth, as seen in a proliferation of villages and small towns in the IVth millennium BC. Subsequently, it may be that as the climate became drier, some of the villages were aban­doned causing market towns to grow and evolve into cities. As some branches of the river became dry, it was necessary to dig canals and establish a complex system of water distribution, and also to bring more land under cultivation by draining swampy areas and irrigating dry land. The accompanying need to organize a work force and coordinate the construction gave birth to the Sumerian civilization, the first to have a hierarchical organization.[7] Studies of human settlements in certain regions of lower Mesopotamia, performed by the American archaeologist Robert Adams, show a decrease in the number of villages, and a concomitant increase in the number of cities and population increases in existing cities, during the period between 3000 and 2500 BC. These really were cities in the true sense of the word: Uruk, one of the largest and oldest, occupies 550 hectares with a wall of circumference 9.5 km. The reconstitution of Uruk’s urbanization in 2500 BC is shown in Figure 2.3 of the following chapter.

The notion of writing first appeared in this urban civilization, in particular in Uruk about 3300 BC (and perhaps also in Suse to the east). One of the oldest texts describes the creation of man, vegetation and animals, and the first five cities (Eridu, Bad Tibira, Larak, Sippar, and Shuruppak). It goes on to argue for the vital need to maintain the hydraulic system, mentioning the necessity of “the cleaning of the small ditches.”[8] Another account contains the following:

“At this time, water was short in Lagas, there was famine in Girsu. Canals were not dug, vast lands were not irrigated by a shadoof (shaduf),[9] abundant water was not used to dampen mead­ows and fields, because humanity counted on rainwater. Asnan did not bring forth dappled bar­ley, no furrow was plowed nor bore fruit! No land was worked nor bore fruit! No country or people made libations of beer or wine, […] sweet wine […], to the gods. No one used the plow to work the vast lands. (…) In order to dig the canals, in order to dredge the irrigation ditches, in order to irrigate the vast lands by a shadoof, in order to utilize abundant water so that the meadows and fields were moistened, An and Enlil put a spade, a hoe, a basket, a plow, the life of the land, at the disposal of the people. After this time, human beings gave all their attention to making the barley grow.” (there follows a list of numerous canals dug by the leaders of Lagash) [10] [11]

A third text describes periods of famine, caused by a conflict between the “waters of the primordial sea” having invaded the earth and the beneficial water of the Tigris.11 Does this perhaps refer to the conflict, common to all deltaic and estuarine zones of large rivers, between fresh and salt water, the latter useless for both cultivation and human consumption?

“Famine was severe, nothing was produced, The small rivers were not cleaned, the dirt was not carried off, On the steadfast fields no water was sprinkled, there was no digging of ditch­es, In all the lands there were no crops, only weeds grew.”

Water and the infrastructure for its conveyance are ever-present needs of civilization, whether for irrigation or flood protection, for water supply or for wastewater drainage from the earliest cities. Added to these needs are those of waterborne commerce, canals, and ports.

This story begins in the East with the great Neolithic revolution, humanity’s funda­mental stride into an economic system of production, of agriculture and its accompany­ing development of the first cities.

From the birth of agriculture to the development of irrigation: the origins of the great Mesopotamian civilizations

In the near-East there is a zone of hills called the “fertile crescent” extending from Syria-Palestine to the foot of Mounts Taurus and Zagros. On these hills, blessed by ample rainfall, naturally grow wild grains such as barley and wheat. The natural fer­tility of this zone began to develop around 16000 BC, when the climate began to become warmer and moister. This occurred first in the western portions of the area where, after the interruption of a dry and cool period from 10500 to 9000 BC, the cli­mate stabilized to become more or less as it is today, albeit somewhat more humid.1 The change continued into the eastern portions of the zone, in the foothills of Mount Zagros in present-day Iraq, and finally ended about 7000 BC with the permanent inun­dation of the Persian Gulf.

In about 12500 BC, in this fertile land in the middle and to the west of the present fertile crescent, the harvesting of wild grains led the hunter-gatherers to begin to set­tle. Toward 9500 BC they began to take charge of their means of subsistence. They came down from the hills to begin early cultivation of domestic grains and cereals in the sedimentary corridor from the Jordan Valley to the upper valley of the Euphrates, and in the oasis of Damas. For example, in the IXth millennium BC, Jericho is a vil­lage located near a spring; a rather large settlement of two hectares and probably hav­ing several hundred inhabitants, surrounded by a thick wall possibly designed to pro­tect the inhabitants from floods. Prehistorians call this corridor the Levantine core (Figure 1.1).[1] [2]

Subsequently, about 8000 BC, this seat of early agriculture moved north to take root in the Syrian interior and in the south of Anadolu. This is when animal husbandry first appeared, as well as the rectangular dwelling, a major architectural innovation

(prior to this, the semi-underground huts were round). The population began to increase, and this in effect marked the beginning of the Neolithic revolution which occurred from about 7500 BC to 4500 BC. [3] Toward the west, this movement gradu­ally reached the Syrian coast, then the West through two parallel paths: the

Mediterranean and the Danube. The population spread also extended toward the east, and it is this eastern spread that interests us here. The Neolithic human tide reaches the Zagros mountains, where it has now become possible for men to live. Indeed, since 7000 BC the Persian Gulf had been flooded, and was even deeper than it is today.

The human tide spreads into some hospitable niches of the arid Syrian desert: the oases of the regions of Palmyra and El-Kown, and the site of Bouqras, at the conflu­ence of the Euphrates and the Khabur.

The rain and natural runoff are at first sufficient to provide enough water for grains and vegetables. Then, the needs of individual, isolated farmers or perhaps small groups of them, led to the advent of irrigation through small ditches. This made it pos­sible to improve yields and cultivate new land that lacked sufficient rainfall. It is very difficult to date these very first and rudimentary “hydraulic works”. It is possible that when settlers began to occupy the oases mentioned above, as at Bouqras where, between 7400 BC and 6800 BC, the flood plain of the Euphrates valley was cultivat­ed,[4] or at El-Kowm where, in the first half of the Vth millennium BC, artesian springs were available, some management of water was already occurring. Moreover, the earli­est evidence of drainage of water from dwellings was found at El Kowm (Figure 1.4).[5]

The first definite evidence of irrigation dates from the VIIth millennium BC – in the middle Tigris valley, at the foot of the Zagros mountains, and at the sites known as the Samarran civilization (Samarra, Sawwan, Choga Mami). At Choga Mami, remains of what are thought to be two-meter wide canals have been found, canals that connect to the rivers and follow elevation contours for hundreds of meters before distributing the spring flood waters into the fields.[6] The first wells appeared in the VIth millennium BC.

Also in the VIth millennium BC, the irrigated cereal-growing know-how began to spread to the Euphrates delta, a potentially fertile area thanks to its silt deposits, but an arid one. This is the Ubaid culture that may have been the inheritor of the Samarran cul­ture. The multiple channels of the delta surely facilitated irrigated farming in this semi­marshy alluvial region. The first great urban civilizations, as we recognize them today, took root here.

From the era of the early cultivators to the conquests of Alexander the Great

From the beginning of history up to the conquests of Alexander the Great, continuous and rapid development of civilization occurred in the valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Nile Rivers, as well as on the shores of the Aegean Sea. Each of these regions has its own particular historical context, and each would be worthy of its own detailed description. But the regions were also closely linked together and unified by extensive trade and military ventures, and by the transfer of technology that came with them.

The historical period of Part I of this book ends in the era of Alexander the Great, whose conquests marked the end of a civilization in the Orient.

To understand this period, one must keep in mind that it includes the Bronze Age, from the IVth millennium BC to the end of the IInd millennium BC, and the transition to the Iron Age. In some areas, such as Egypt, this transition occurred smoothly and con­tinuously. In other areas, such as Greece, the transition represented profound ruptures with the past.

Water is the key to all civilization. The diverse and often competing uses of water inevitably lead to tensions and conflicts in its management and allocation. Water tech­nology has progressed from the primitive to the advanced, but this progress has not changed man’s continuous responsibility for careful and fair management of this pre­cious resource.

Initially, my objective was to give my students at l’Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees a historical perspective before getting into the craft of the engineer and mod­ern techniques for flow modeling. But as I tried to travel back in time to reconstruct the historical relations between mankind and water, I quickly realized what a distant horizon this quest represented. The wealth of knowledge to be mined from the past quickly became apparent – not only in the descriptions of hydraulic works and analysis tech­niques developed by our distant ancestors, but also in the relation between the develop­ment of hydraulics and of civilization itself. It seems to me that it is as important to understand the context and circumstances of innovations, and their entry into the knowl­edge base of civilization, as it is to describe the innovations themselves.

This book does not pretend to be a comprehensive catalog of hydraulic works. I have tried to be reasonably complete, while limiting the scope of my studies to the vast and continuous landmass extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the China Sea. My his­torical perspective extends in time from the ancient Near East, to Antiquity (the historic period preceding the Middle Ages in Europe), and then to the medieval world; from the known origins of Neolithic water management, up until the Renaissance and the advent of modern fluid mechanics. One could legitimately criticize this work for having ignored certain civilizations, for example the pre-Columbian world in the Americas. But the objective of the book – to describe ancient works and processes and situate them in the melding of the East and the West in a unified manner – led me to limit my attention to the Eastern hemisphere.

To give the reader a feel – a bit of taste and smell – of the ancient civilizations, I lib­erally include citations from ancient authors themselves – scribes and chroniclers, trav­elers such as Xenophon and Ibn Battuta, historians such as Herodotus and Sima Qian, geographers or architects like Strabo and Vitruvius. I make an effort to complement the text with numerous maps, plans, and sketches, for nothing is more annoying than to read the description of a site without being able to see where it is.

This work is presented in two parts. The first covers the period prior to the 3rd cen­tury BC. It deals with the land bounded by Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Aegean Sea, where the stage was set for the meeting of the geometry of the Greeks and the hydraulic know-how of the East at Alexandria and elsewhere. The second part begins with the hydrostatics of Archimedes and the earliest devices based on the use of water pressure. This part of the book broadens the perspective to include the main developments of the Roman, Chinese, and Arab empires, and finally, those of the medieval world. This per­spective does not necessarily lead to a strictly chronological presentation of the materi­al; the chronological table at the end of the book serves this purpose for the interested reader.

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This work of Pierre-Louis Viollet on the history of hydraulics in the ancient civilizations, more generally in the civilizations of the classical era and the Middle Ages, is important for several reasons.

First of all, the author is the first scholar who has attempted, with success, a com­plete synthesis of techniques in hydraulics, from the birth of agriculture in Syria – Palestine up to the beginning of the modern period. He gives due consideration to the role of the Mediterranean world and the Near and Far East, as well as the Indian and Chinese worlds, as precursors to this development of techniques. There has been no comparable effort of this scale to present, and to explain in a concrete manner, the diver­sity and evolution of hydraulic knowledge and techniques over such a vast geographical space and over the long expanse of several millennia, taking into account the historical context.

The second reason, one that is fundamental to the importance of this marvelous book, is that the author is neither a historian nor an archaeologist. He is, rather, an engi­neer whose background gives him a unique ability to understand the operation of and interest in hydraulic works, installations that had been previously known only through vague descriptions, imprecise representations, or physical remains in an extreme state of deterioration. The author’s contribution would be fundamental for this reason alone. Despite the originality and quality of previous works on archaeological hydraulics, their impact has often been compromised by a weak knowledge of the physical principles that are indispensable to an understanding of the workings, importance, and innovation of hydraulic projects. The present work is rich in such technical analyses of ancient inno­vations, providing thoughtful explanations and commentary on both the nature of these discoveries and their technical pertinence. Therefore this is much more than an ordered compilation of facts – which would be of great interest in its own right – it is a true syn­thesis that is focused on the importance of ancient discoveries, giving them texture and richness through the author’s scientific and technical perspective.

This book is important for yet another reason. It always presents hydraulic devel­opments and innovation in their historical and intellectual context. Even though his pri­mary objective is the historical development of hydraulics, Pierre-Louis Viollet has endowed his book with an overview of world history in general. His work is aligned with traditional notions of historical periods, but he gives these periods fresh signifi­cance in highlighting the number and importance of technical innovations associated with them. In this respect, the decisive changes are those that occur after the conquests of Alexander, in particular at Alexandria but also in the rest of the Hellenistic world. The originality of Chapter 5 is not only in its presentation of a broad panorama of these inno­vations and inventions; but it is also in its demonstration that these developments not only represent a natural continuation of the classical age’s tradition of technical thought, but also reflect the application of analytical methods elaborated by philosophers from the empirical developments of Oriental civilizations. This demonstration deflates the importance of works that see these inventions as simple inspirations of thought, uncon­nected to any context of reality, and that expect to find “cultural obstacles” to the exploitation of these inventions. The lack of any practical application or development of “Heron’s steam ball” invention, which demonstrates the principle of a steam engine, has undoubtedly led to erroneous conclusions in this regard. The consequences of tech­niques invented by the Alexandrians resulted in numerous and very important applica­tions during the Roman period. From all perspectives imperial Rome is a civilization of water, as seen in its technology for the transport and distribution of water, as well as in its thermal installations.

This example is but one of many showing the richness of a book that succeeds in not only presenting an inventory of the state of knowledge in hydraulic techniques, but also in enrichening this knowledge in many respects, some of which are of considerable sig­nificance. Study of this book is indispensable for specialists in the history of technolo­gy, economy, and thought.

Georges Tate

Professor of Ancient History at the University of Versailles – Saint-Quentin Former Deputy Scientific Director of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences of CNRS Former Director of IFAPO at Damascus

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I would like to thank the archaeologists, specialists in the ancient civilizations, and engi­neers interested in the history of hydraulics who so generously shared their unpublished work with me. In particular, I would like to thank Gilbert Argoud, Frank Braemer, Corinne Debaine-Francfort, Bernard Geyer, and Philippe Leveau. I would especially like to thank Gtinther Garbrecht, with whom I have had a continuing correspondence, and who provided me with abundant documentation of his own work in Egypt, Palestine and Anadolu. I would also like especially to thank Jean-Claude Margueron who opened his personal library on Mesopotamia to me, and with whom I had lively discussions. Felipe Martinez and Cristobal Mateos graciously shared several works and articles on ancient hydraulic works in Spain, for which I thank them. I would also like to thank the staff of the Center of Contemporary and Historic Documentation of l’Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, who helped me in my searches of the ancient archives. This work is a synthesis, and therefore I must recognize all those who, by their field work and study of ancient texts, have put together the body of knowledge without which this book would not have been possible. Finally, I would like to thank Forrest and Joyce Holly for their teamwork in bringing this English translation to fruition.

Pierre-Louis Viollet

Pierre-Louis Viollet published the first edition of his book as I was finishing my academ­ic career at the University of Iowa. I decided then that a challenging first project in my new life would be to spend a few months translating his work into English. A few months curiously inflated to nearly three years as other projects caught my attention, and meanwhile Pierre-Louis published the second edition of his book. I am pleased to have been able to complete this most enjoyable and educational task, and thank Pierre-Louis for having given me the opportunity to make his wonderful work available to a wider audience.

To the extent possible, I have attempted to preserve Pierre-Louis’ organization of material at the paragraph level. Although the names of ancient people and places do not always have unique representations in French or English, I have tried to adopt consistent English names from among those that appear in the literature. In translating several ancient texts for which it was not possible to cite published English translations, I pre­served the ancient modes of expression captured in Pierre-Louis’ translations in adapt­ing them to the English edition. Responsibility for any inconsistencies or mistransla­tions is mine and mine alone.

I was fortunate to be able to do much of this work in the Iowa City Public Library, and also in the University of Iowa’s main library – both are marvelous facilities of which the City and University can be extremely proud. I completed the draft translation while in residence at the University of Nice Sofia-Antipolis, France, as a guest instructor in the Erasmus Mundus EuroAquae Hydroinformatics Masters program. I would especially like to thank Philippe Gourbesville and his colleagues and staff, especially Annie Vahramain, for their support and collegiality during this period. During this time Pierre- Louis and Dominique Viollet graciously hosted me for a final working session in Paris.

Finally, this project would have been impossible without the encouragement and moral and editorial support of my wife Joyce, who suffered through several proofread­ings, was never shy about pointing out the need for rewriting, and patiently tolerated my endless hours at the keyboard.

Forrest M. Holly Jr.