Hydrography of Mesopotamia. Rivers and Channels in Babylonia from the 4th to the 1st Millennium BCE

In the late 4th millennium BCE, southern Mesopotamia, i.e. the floodplain between Euphrates and Tigris which extends approximately from modern Baġdād southwards to the Gulf, gave birth to mankind’s first urban civilization. From here, important achievements originated, including the formation of cities; technological innovations; writing; to name but a few. The wave of original contributions to civilization was made possible by favourable environmental, socio-ecological and economic conditions. The basic prerequisite was an extremely high-yield agricultural set-up. Given the aridity of the climate in the region, it depended on irrigation. For that purpose, an ingenious system of rivers and canals was built, and it was this which made agriculture on the attested scale possible. The water for the canals was supplied mainly by two rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, flowing from the Anatolian highlands to the Gulf. While the earliest irrigation systems were based on watercourses formed by natural processes such as avulsions and aggradation on riverine levees, human interaction eventually led to small-scale irrigation systems on crevasse splays and the levee backslopes which could even be operated by smaller communities. The interaction between natural processes and human activities eventually led to a hydraulic landscape characterized by a dense network of natural and large, artificially created canals constituting complex irrigation systems with a variety of hydraulic devices including weirs, dams, reservoirs and a corresponding administrative structure, subject to a varying, size-dependent degree of centralization.

Countless cuneiform tablets and monumental inscriptions, dating from the late 4th to the 1st millennium BCE, preserve the earliest and most extensive corpus of written sources on early irrigation culture. Written in Sumerian and Akkadian, these texts include a broad range of genres: a large part of the corpus consists of royal inscriptions commemorating royal canal building projects and archival documents from institutional households managing irrigation agriculture. A few examples shall suffice, for instance, lexical lists provide vocabulary, mathematical exercises calculate work quota for irrigation works, while literary compositions address agriculture and irrigation. Together, these textual sources draw a very informative picture of almost every aspect involved in these complex processes. Such attention to detail is further borne out by the fact that not just rivers but also all larger and medium-sized canals had their own names, mentioned abundantly in the texts.

Despite the fact that these texts are well-known, the attested canals have so far only been selectively geo-localized and associated with place names of settlements that were located along them. One major difficulty is that over the course of the three millennia under consideration here, canals not only frequently migrated but were also renamed several times. Likewise, rivers were subject to environmental changes (e.g. climate, sea level, tectonics) and, accordingly, their dynamics in terms of discharge, sediment transport and channel stability varied through time, impacting human settlements and irrigation infrastructure. In addition, waterworks were almost always earthen structures, and as such are hardly detectable by traditional archaeological methods. Moreover, because the cuneiform sources are written in two different languages (Sumerian and Akkadian), a systematic, diachronic evaluation of the concordance between settlements, their toponymy and the hydronyms associated with them is lacking. To date, there are no comprehensive studies for the whole of Babylonia linking archaeological, philological, and hydrographical (geographical river reconstruction) data. While many publications discuss the potential link between environmental changes – and especially climatic change and droughts – and major societal changes that affected ancient Mesopotamia, complete datasets with a focus on river networks and river dynamics are still missing. However, they are essential for identifying and understanding the relevant interactions between humans and their environment. 

The aim of the interdisciplinary project is to use formal network analysis to link toponyms and hydronyms mentioned in texts with archaeological data on settlements and hydrographical network reconstructions based on remote sensing. The project will be the first to use a data-driven, Digital Humanities approach to bring together different datasets from different disciplines in an interdisciplinary manner, and from this newly construct a multi-temporal network of rivers and canals, which cover several key periods of the Mesopotamian history from the 4th to the 1st millennium BCE. The complementary combination of different data sets will help fill the gaps of each individual set and improve the level of accuracy. This data will be entered into an interactive database, will be further developed dynamically and will allow for subsequent inclusion of new data sets brought to light by current and future excavation activities. Together, this data forms the basis for the project’s network analysis: with a newly created, multi-temporal network of rivers and canals, the project will analyse changes in hydrography and link the results to knowledge of societal evolution, de- rived from existing archaeological findings. In addition, the purpose-built network will provide the foundation for developing a simple hydraulic model. This model will, in turn, allow a closer investigation of specific environmental changes, such as how aridity affects water flux within a network, and thereby foster further analyses of the impact these environmental changes had on civilization.

The data collected within this Sinergia project will be published as Open Research Data (ORD) in compliance with the FAIR and CARE principles. Digital publication formats aim at human oriented, research data repositories and machine oriented re-use. Research outcome will also be visualized as static maps for the key periods of the Mesopotamian history.