Changes in the Euphrates River
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Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVII:1 (Summer, 2016), 1–25. Faisal H. Husain Changes in the Euphrates River: Ecology and Politics in a Rural Ottoman Periphery, 1687–1702 The Euphrates River mobilizes water and sediment into a dynamic and complex flow powered by the energy of the sun and gravity of the earth. It delicately changes through space and time and adjusts to prevailing environmental conditions. Spatially, runoff and sedi- ment production predominate in the headwater regions of the Taurus Mountains and Anatolian highlands before the river turns into a sediment sink and loses much of its water through dissipation and evaporation in the Iraqi alluvium. Temporally, the river dis- plays markedly different characteristics in the summer and spring, with contrasting discharge rates and water-surface elevations. Between 1687 and 1702, these timeless, ever-recurring re- gional and seasonal changes were eclipsed by intense ecological disturbances that transformed the Euphrates’ hydraulic architec- ture. A dramatic rupture in the river’s flow occurred when a large segment of it, approximately 100 miles in length, escaped its estab- lished channel and gushed into a new one. The abrupt relocation of the river, a process called avulsion by geologists and hydrolo- gists, profoundly altered the ecology and politics of Iraq and im- periled the stability of the Ottoman Empire in the east, threatening traditional centers of power and permitting otherwise lesser tribes to enjoy a temporary ascendance. Thousands of lives were lost during the intervening years, and numerous settlements were abandoned and left to ruin. This article documents the metamorphosis of the Euphrates River in the late seventeenth century. Beginning in 1687, a prolonged meteorological anomaly and an ill-fated irrigation pro- ject divided the middle Euphrates in Iraq into two capricious branches (Figure 1). For a constellation of reasons, the Ottoman central and provincial administrations were incapable of resolving Faisal H. Husain is a doctoral candidate, Dept. of History, Georgetown University. He is the author of “In the Bellies of the Marshes: Water and Power in the Countryside of Ottoman Baghdad,” Environmental History, XIX (2014), 638–664. The author thanks J. R. McNeill for his support. © 2016 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_00939 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00939 by guest on 26 September 2021 2 | FAISAL H. HUSAIN Fig.1 The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers NOTE Map details are approximate. the environmental crisis until the river had completely abandoned its original bed in 1700. The channel pattern that emerged there- after withstood the assault of an engineering expedition tasked with undoing the avulsion in 1701/2, thus facilitating the fall of the Ottoman Rumahiyya fort southwest of Baghdad and the ascen- dancy of the Khazaʿil tribe. Much like the Nile and the Danube, the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers had an inestimable significance for the Ottoman Empire. These two arteries pulsed with the circulatory movement of nat- ural resources, goods, and people. The flow of water within this capillary system made irrigation agriculture in vast tracts of arid Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00939 by guest on 26 September 2021 CHANGES IN THE EUPHRATES RIVER | 3 land possible and nurtured the daily lives of tens of thousands of productive, tax-paying peasants. Moreover, water made both rivers a low-cost and navigable transportation network that knitted together various Ottoman provinces in Anatolia, Syria, and Iraq and connected the Ottoman heartland with the world of the Indian Ocean. Basra in the sixteenth century was the most important hub downstream, serving as a clearinghouse for commodities arriving from India, Iran, Iraq, Anatolia, Syria, and Arabia—textiles, spices, wool, dates, rice, slaves, and concubines. From Basra, a sizeable proportion of the commercial and human trafficmadeitsway northward via riverboats as far as Baghdad on the Tigris and Hilla on the Euphrates, despite the difficulty of upstream navigation. Ottoman agents exploited this bustling movement by maintaining customhouses at several points along the rivers to collect tolls on behalf of the provincial administration. From Baghdad, Hilla, and other nearby shipyards, camel caravans further distributed the riv- erine cargo toward Aleppo, Iskenderun, Tripoli, and the far cor- ners of the Ottoman Empire.1 More convenient and significant was downstream transporta- tion. From upstream provinces—such as Birecik, Raqqa, Diyarbakır, and Mosul—officials managed the riverine transport of heavy artil- leries, wheat, barley, and other provisions for the needs of the Ottoman armies and forts on the eastern frontiers. Armaments and rations aside, soldiers, rowers, carpenters, and other skilled laborers descended downstream to buttress Ottoman military efforts. As a result, the Tigris and Euphrates became a lifeline for Ottoman de- fenses during conflicts with the Safavids, the Portuguese, and the tribal groups that regularly challenged Ottoman hegemony in the east from the sixteenth century onward. Flowing downstream as well under the auspices of the Ottoman administration were cru- cial natural resources that Iraq’s alluvial plain lacked, notably, the roofing-grade timber and metals necessary for the construction and the reconstruction of dams, forts, bridges, and the holy shrines in Najaf and Karbala. This intricate web of interests, tightly knit with 1 Cengiz Orhonlu and Turgut Işıksal, “Osmanlı Devrinde Nehir Nakliyatı Hakkında Araştırmalar: Dicle ve Fırat Nehirlerdine Nakliyat,” Tarih Dergisi, XIII (1962–1963), 79– 102; Suraiya Faroqhi, “Crisis and Change, 1590–1699,” in Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert (eds.), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1914 (New York, 1997), II, 483–487. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00939 by guest on 26 September 2021 4 | FAISAL H. HUSAIN water, would unravel once the Euphrates unexpectedly altered its pattern.2 The environmental shift under analysis appears in the most comprehensive histories of Ottoman Iraq as a sudden, arbitrary rupture that took place in 1700, unconnected with any preceding crisis that had engulfed the region. That dating is based on chron- icles that recorded only the climax of a long-term process. The discussion herein, which combines tree-ring analysis (dendrochro- nology) with untapped archival sources, argues that the Euphrates started to re-position its course at an earlier date, in part because of an exceptionally dry period in central Anatolia in 1687 and 1688. This earlier dating has major historiographical implications. It uncovers distinct causes that lay behind the river’s tumultuous reconfiguration and connects the calamitous events that afflicted Iraq between 1687 and 1702, once thought to be random, into a coherent whole. As Ball remarked, “Flowing water is not simply an unstructured chaos but contains persistent forms that can be recognized, recorded, analyzed—forms, moreover, that are of great beauty, of value to the artist as well as the scientist,” not to mention historians of Ottoman Iraq.3 The study of morphological change in the Tigris and Euphrates has been largely the domain of archaeologists and earth scientists. Given that a significant portion of the literature is theoretical, this article aims to bring an empirical, holistic approach to the study of avulsion, concerned not only with causal factors but also with society’s response and adaptation to it. Archaeologists and scientists have deftly outlined the skeleton of avulsion in Mesopotamia, to which historians can add the sorely needed flesh and blood. The eyewitness accounts utilized herein offer a unique opportunity to 2 Salih Özbaran, “XVI. Yüzyılda Basra Körfezi Sahillerinde Osmanlılar: Basra Beylerbeyliğinin Kuruluşu,” Tarih Dergisi, XXV (1971), 51–72; Jon E. Mandaville, “The Ottoman Province of al Hasa in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, XC (1970), 486–513; Abdurrahman Sağırlı, “Cezayir-i Irak-ı Arab veya Şattü’l-Arab’ınFethi— Ulyanoğlu Seferi—1565–1571,” Tarih Dergisi, XLI (2005), 43–94; Selçuk Dursun, “Forest and the State: History of Forestry and Forest Administration in the Ottoman Empire,” unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Sabancı University, 2007), 50–51; Orhonlu and Işıksal, “Dicle ve Fırat”; Faroqhi, “Crisis and Change,” 483–487. 3 Philip Ball, Nature’s Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts. II. Flow (New York, 2009), 11–12. For the history of Ottoman Iraq, see ʿAbbas al-ʿAzzawi, Tarikh al-ʿIraq bayna Ihtilalayn (Beirut, 2004), V, 178–182; S. Helmsley Longrigg, Four Centuries of Modern Iraq (Oxford, 1925), 121– 122; Clément Huart, Histoire de Bagdad dans les temps modernes (Paris, 1901), 139–142. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00939 by guest on 26 September 2021 CHANGES IN THE EUPHRATES RIVER | 5 move the analysis of channel evolution from the inanimate, all- seeing GIS map to the living experience of anxious urban scribes, weary construction workers, and valiant tribal sheikhs situated in the middle of the changing alluvial environment.4 DROUGHT The dread of famine gripped Baghdad on Tuesday, December 7, 1688. Starving families from Mosul and the Kurdish regions flocked to the city begging for aid. Epidemics infected the refugee population, many of which failed to