443 Water Management in Assyria from the Ninth To

ARAM, 13-14 (2001-2002), 443-460 S. DALLEY 443 WATER MANAGEMENT IN ASSYRIA FROM THE NINTH TO THE SEVENTH CENTURIES BC1 STEPHANIE DALLEY The Assyrians, building up from the ninth century onwards, ruled an empire that eventually stretched from Tarsus in Cilicia to the eastern border of Egypt, from Armenia to Bahrein. Enormous wealth and talent flowed into the heart- land through tax, tribute and trade, through deportation and the magnetic at- traction of working for the most powerful kings in the world. From an Assyrian perspective it was the duty of a successful king not only to enrich the nation through conquest, but also to display power through fine buildings and the patronage of great art, through engineering works and the conspicuous management of water provided for great cities, parks and gardens, notably at Nineveh, Nimrud and Arbela. Provided that the technology was available, the Assyrian king had the manpower and the raw materials to achieve whatever he wanted, regardless of time, wastefulness and the health and safety of his work- men. Assyrian achievements in water management are seldom mentioned in books which claim to describe the early development of technology. Many books and articles on ancient technology, such as those of White, Landels and Oleson, begin with the Greek world, or restrict themselves to purely archaeological evidence from the Near East. The volume of World Archaeology in 1980 which was dedicated to the subject of Water Management did not cover the Assyrian evidence. The Bulletin of Sumerian Agriculture did not cover the Assyrians in its volume on irrigation and water control.2 Another cause for neglect lies in differences in the way that various branches of learning have developed. As a result of several factors including especially the Renaissance, Greek culture has an unbroken thread of tradition, whereas the civilisation of Mesopotamia has had to be reconstructed after complete loss. By comparison, the literature of the latter is specialist, wide- spread and disorganised, and the sources fragmentary. The complexities and ambiguities of the cuneiform writing system mean that one often has to wait 1 I would like to thank Dr. Shafiq Abou-Zayd for arranging such a useful conference; Dr. Andrew Wilson for bibliography and subsequent fruitful discussions on qanats; and Dr. Peter Kingsley for help with bibliography. 2 Notable exceptions include M. Drower, “Water supply, Irrigation and Agriculture”, in A History of Technology, ed. C. Singer et al., (Oxford 1954), esp. pp. 531 and 553; and F.W. Rob- ins, The Story of Water Supply, (Oxford 1946), 36-7. 444 WATER MANAGEMENT IN ASSYRIA for a duplicate with variants to turn up before one can be certain of understanding a long-known inscription. Moreover, the phenomenon of the named, national culture-hero / inventor in Greek tradition stands in sharp contrast to the anonymity of inventions and achievements in the ancient Near East. This is as true of technical inventions as of authorship: we do not know who engineered Sennacherib’s aqueduct, but we do know that an engineer named Eupolinos constructed a tunnel and water system for Polycrates on Samos. In ancient Mesopotamia, creative efforts, whether in literature or technology, were either anonymous or attributed to the royal patron. But among Greeks and Romans, famous men such as Archi- medes had inventions or principles attributed to them, and some of these attri- butions are demonstrably wrong. In the case of Pythagoras, we know that some of the work credited to him is certainly earlier. In the case of Hippo- damus of Miletus, the grid-plan for city layout, attributed to him, is attested much earlier, in the East Mediterranean at Tell Dor,3 and even earlier at the Urartian fortress of Bastam in NW Iran.4 Critias5 attributed to the Athenians the invention of the potter’s wheel and the clay oven, but few archaeologists now would give him credence.6 Terpander was credited with inventing the 7-string lyre, which is now attested from the Minoan Bronze Age.7 In some of these cases re-invention may be at issue rather than deliberate falsification or misguided chauvinism. Above all, however, there is still uncertainty over exactly what technology was available to the Assyrians from the ninth century onwards. This is partly due to difficulties involved in reading and understanding cuneiform texts, along with difficulties in finding and interpreting material remains. On this occasion two items in particular are investigated: whether or not the qanat was known from the late eighth century BC, as has been claimed in the past, and whether the water-raising screw was in use at that time. 1. THE QUESTION OF QANATS The qanat is usually defined as a sloping underground tunnel with vertical access shafts at regular intervals, designed to collect and conduct ground water, sometimes accessing a “mother well” at its starting point. It was thought by some to derive its inspiration from shaft-mining, which is hard to date, but definitely attested by the Roman period. Qanats are likewise hard to date, but 3 E. Stern, Dor, ruler of the seas, (Jerusalem 1994), 159. 4 W. Kleiss, Bastam (Berlin 1979). 5 As quoted by Athenaeus in Deipnosophistae I 28. 6 The phenomenon is discussed by A.Kleingünther, Protos Heuretes (Leipzig 1933). 7 A. Lesky, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, 3rd ed. (Bern and München 1971), pp.155-156. S. DALLEY 445 were certainly used in the Roman period, and are generally thought to have spread from origins in Persia. One of their great advantages is that the flow of water is protected from pollution, by comparison with an open watercourse. THE NEGOUB TUNNEL The earliest great construction work in which the Assyrians are known to have exhibited their ability to manage water on a grand scale is the series of tunnels with its associated canal, which brought clear mountain water from the Upper Zab river into Nimrud, ancient Calah, via a tunnel cut through an out- crop of conglomerate rock at Negoub.8 The original canal named Patti-hegalli “Abundance Canal” was cut by Assurnasirpal II (884-859), who also built the great Northwest Palace at Nimrud. It extended for more than 19.5 km, requir- ing several weirs on its way. It was probably associated with 7km of tunnel, dug by joining between the bottoms of vertical shafts which had been cut through the conglomerate at regular intervals, and was intended to irrigate fields outside the city as well as for urban use, especially for the palace garden described in the famous Banquet Stela inscription of Assurnasirpal.9 Owing to the flat gradient, the canal may have silted up rather fast. Of two later tunnels in the same area, the earlier was cut by Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BC).10 It was blocked up, and both the earlier installations were replaced under Esarhaddon (680-669 BC), who left an inscription there (now very dam- aged),11 recounting that the older tunnel of Assurnasirpal II had silted up. Esarhaddon’s tunnel had shafts about 15m deep with stairs cut along one side, and the height of the tunnel itself is estimated between 4 and 5m. The entrance to the tunnel consists of three narrower tunnels which join the main tunnel after 8m, and their purpose was probably to accommodate sluice gates of man- ageable size. Grooves for those gates were still observable in 1985. In order to slow the flow of water as it entered the tunnel, there was a 3 m rise, a deliberate “negative grade”, over the length of the tunnel, to dissipate the water cur- rent and prevent erosion of the banks at the entrance to the tunnel. These works demonstrate a system of waterworks with canals and tunnels, in which the total length was at least 24 km. The evidence shows how trial and error rather than any application of theoretical principles governed the scheme, and how different phases of work were spread over three centuries. Although the tunnel was constructed with vertical shafts at intervals, Davey stated clearly that it was not to be confused with a genuine qanat, which collects ground 8 C.J. Davey, “The Negub Tunnel”, Iraq 47 (1985), pp. 49-55. See also J.N. Postgate, “Negub”, in Reallexikon der Assyriologie (1999), p. 207. 9 A.K. Grayson, Assyrian Royal Inscriptions vol. 2 (Wiesbaden 1976), p. 172 gives a transla- tion. 10 D. Oates, Studies in the Ancient History of Northern Iraq, (Oxford 1968), p. 47. 11 R. Borger, Die Inschriften Asarhaddons (Graz 1956), pp. 35-36. 446 WATER MANAGEMENT IN ASSYRIA water and is not connected to river or spring water. However, it clearly has most of the features typical of a genuine qanat. URARTIAN WATERWORKS IN E. ANATOLIA Some inspiration for Assyrian water management of this kind may have come from other countries, for instance from Urartu in eastern Turkey, where Assyrian kings campaigned, especially during the late eighth century, but also at an earlier date. To look at this evidence involves a new investigation con- cerning the origins of the qanat, for which improved textual understanding goes hand-in-hand with detailed evidence from archaeological work. When the Urartian king Sarduris I c. 830 BC chose Teushpa near Lake Van as his capital, he and his successor Menua were obliged to bring drinking water over a distance of 66km. because the lake itself has undrinkable water and none of its feeder streams is perennial. Retaining walls for this canal still stand up to a height of 20m, and the aqueduct which brought the water across a val- ley was built using tree trunks and earth packing, a construction which is thought to have survived with regular repairs and maintenance into the 19th century AD.12 Subsequently Rusa I (contemporary with Sargon II) or Rusa II (just after Sennacherib’s reign) built dams and made an artificial lake with a sluice gate, and a number of small reservoirs.

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