![]() This resulted in rivers rising faster and changing their courses more often in Mesopotamia.īoth the Mesopotamian irrigation system and that in the Egyptian delta were of the basin type, which were opened by digging a gap in the embankment and closed by placing mud back into the gap. Irrigation was extremely vital to Mesopotamia, Greek for "the land between the rivers." Flooding problems were more serious in Mesopotamia than in Egypt because the Tigris and Euphrates carried several times more silt per unit volume of water than the Nile. It is also of interest that these people, from the beginning of recorded history, fought over water rights. The Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia built city walls and temples and dug canals that were the world's first engineering works. The building of canals continued in Egypt throughout the centuries. These consisted of a bucket on the end of a cord that hung from the long end of a pivoted boom, counterweightedĪt the short end. In many places where fields were too high to receive water from the canals, water was drawn from the canals or the Nile directly by a swape or a shaduf. During low flows, the land did not receive water, and no crops could grow. During very high flows, the dikes were washed away and villages flooded, drowning thousands. Problems regarding the uncertainty of the flow of the Nile were recognized. The land was checkerboarded with small basins, defined by a system of dikes. ![]() One of the first duties of provincial governors was the digging and repair of canals, which were used to flood large tracts of land while the Nile was flowing high. In ancient Egypt, the construction of canals was a major endeavor of the pharaohs and their servants, beginning in Scorpio's time. The first successful efforts to control the flow of water were made in Mesopotamia and Egypt, where the remains of the prehistoric irrigation works still exist. Such changes probably first took place in the hills to the north of present-day Iraq and Syria. Only in the past 9,000 to 10,000 years have humans discovered how to raise crops and tame animals. Humans have spent most of their history as hunting and food-gathering beings. It was only during the Holocene epoch (10,000 years ago) that the development of agriculture occurred, keeping in mind that the Earth and solar system are 4.6 billion years old. Humans are newcomers to Earth, even though their achievements have been enormous.
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