Geography of Mesopotamia - Perennial Irrigation

Perennial Irrigation

The dense population arose from the elaborate irrigation of the Babylonian plain, which had originally reclaimed it from a pestiferous and uninhabitable swamp, and had made it the most fertile country in the world. The science of irrigation and engineering seems to have been first developed in Babylonia, which was covered by a network of canals, all skillfully planned and regulated. The three chief of them carried off the waters of the Euphrates to the Tigris above Babylon: the Zabzallat canal (or Nahr Sarsar) running from Faluja to Ctesiphon, the Kutha canal from Sippara to Madam, passing Tell Ibrahim or Kuth'a on the way, and the King's canal or Ar-Malcha between the other two. This last, which perhaps owed its name to Hammurabi, was conducted from the Euphrates towards Upi or Opis, which has been shown by H. Winckler (Altorientalische Forschungen, ii. pp. 509 seq.) to have been close to Seleucia on the western side of the Tigris. The Pallacopas, called Pallukkatu in the Neo-Babylonian texts, started from Pallukkatu or Falluja, and running parallel to the western bank of the Euphrates as far as Iddaratu or Teredon, (?) watered an immense tract of land and supplied a large lake near Borsippa. B. Meissner may be right in identifying it with "the Canal of the Sun-god" of the early texts.

Thanks to this system of irrigation, the cultivation of the soil was highly advanced in Babylonia. According to Herodotus (1.193), wheat commonly returned two hundredfold to the sower, and occasionally three hundredfold. Pliny the Elder (H. N. xviii. 11) states that it was cut twice, and afterwards was good keep for sheep, and Berossus remarked that wheat, sesame, barley, ochrys, palms, apples and many kinds of shelled fruit grew wild, as wheat still does in the neighbourhood of Anah. A Persian poem celebrated the 360 uses of the palm (Strabo xvi. I. 14), and Ammianus Marcellinus (xxiv. 3) says that from the point reached by Julian's army to the shores of the Persian Gulf was one continuous forest of verdure.