Cooperation and Private Enterprise in Water Management in Iraq: Continuity and Change between the Sasanian and Early Islamic Periods (Sixth to Tenth Centuries)

Abstract

This article shows that the management of water resources in Late Sasanian and Early Islamic Iraq (sixth to tenth centuries ad) implied the participation of local communities and the mutual cooperation of landholders. The organisation of water management in the Late Sasanian Period (sixth to seventh centuries) depended on a highly complex system of interaction between local communities, aristocratic rulers and the imperial bureaucracy. This interaction allowed the government to gather information from different regions of the empire and to understand the needs of the different stakeholders. As such, the system provided a favourable institutional framework for the expansion of irrigated agriculture. The system changed when landholding conditions were transformed in the Early Islamic period, during the ninth century. These institutional transformations allowed the influence of a group of tax-farmers and merchant-bankers to increase. Irrigation policies were therefore bent to the interests of these new elites, which often lay in short-term gains rather than in long-term success. The article suggests that, in the long run, these socio-economic and institutional changes contributed substantially to the breakdown of the agricultural system in Ancient Iraq.

New Insights on the Role of Environmental Dynamics Shaping Southern Mesopotamia: From the Pre-Ubaid to the Early Islamic Period

“…Although irrigation was present in Nippur in the earliest levels from the phytoliths analysed, it greatly expanded around the time of the Sasanian period, from the third century A.D. or later. This is supported by historical sources from the region that show expansion of irrigation during the Sasanian period (Campopiano 2017). Our results likely reflect the major irrigation works that began to be created by this period.…”

The Archaeology of Field Systems in Al-Andalus

“…When we think of the hydraulic techniques that spread throughout the Iberian Peninsula, we usually think of water collection techniques such as qanāt(s) and water-lifting devices, or water mills with vertical penstocks [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46]. Some authors have gone to great efforts to demonstrate the Roman origin and the diffusion of these hydraulic techniques [47][48][49][50] that, moreover, were already intensively used in Sassanian Mesopotamia [51].…”

“…However, it was used as a means of water derivation and no longer as a reservoir because it was filled with sediment [53]. Thus, the discovery of the Lex Rivi Hiberiensis is indicative of an irrigated fluvial space near the Ebro River and an organization of the distribution of water [50][51][52][53][54], but it does not provide information about the continuity of either the space or its management, nor does it justify the inability to build new hydraulic systems in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the spatial association between irrigated areas and the archaeological sites near the Martín River (from the 6th and 7th centuries) and in the area of La Redehuerta, in the valley of the Guadalupe River (Alcañiz), (from the 4th and 5th centuries) made it possible to suggest that the irrigation in the bottom of these valleys predates the Islamic conquest [55,56].…”

Recent trends in Middle East economic history: Cultural factors and structural change in the medieval period 650–1500 (Part one)

“…Changes in the flows of Iraq's main waterways, for instance, may have resulted in earlier deterioration of agriculture, attested to in other sources and expressed in decline in tax revenue (Christensen, ; Verkinderen, ). Changes in rural property structures and arrangements, may have affected levels of cultivation, crops and rural settlement (Campopiano, ). In the pre‐modern Middle East, Roger Owen observed, the sweeping generalizations of the ‘so‐called ‘decline’ of the 1500–1800, were unsubstantiated by evidence: “The problem with this approach is that it rests on only the flimsiest basis in fact (Owen, ).”…”