Water
By DANIEL WEISS
Friday, February 10, 2023
Located at the northwest edge of the Arabian Desert, the ancient city of Petra received less than four inches of rain each year. Nonetheless, in its heyday as the capital of the Nabataean Kingdom (first century B.C. to first century A.D.), the city thrived by carefully hoarding this meager rainfall and routing water from several natural springs in the surrounding hills. This required building a system of aqueducts, channels, bridges, and arches, and installing a network of pipelines. The system measured more than 30 miles in all and supplied the city with 35 million gallons of water per year. Petra’s extensive hydraulic infrastructure helped support a population of around 30,000. It also allowed for extravagant displays of conspicuous consumption designed to impress traders and dignitaries who made their way to the city, which was at the crossroads of caravan trade routes connecting Arabia and the Mediterranean.
Among the most impressive of these projects was a monumental garden and pool that, since 1998, has been excavated by a team led by archaeologist Leigh-Ann Bedal of Penn State Erie, the Behrend College. On a terrace in the middle of the city that was once thought to have been the site of a marketplace, Bedal’s team uncovered evidence of the pool, which had been hewn from bedrock and measured 150 feet long by 75 feet wide and eight feet deep. In the middle was an island, 33 by 46 feet, outfitted with a pavilion decorated with imported marble and painted stucco. According to Bedal, the island would have been an ideal spot for banqueting or engaging in confidential conversations. “The pavilion had doors on all four sides, so you could see anyone coming,” she says. “You also had the sounds of water falling into the pool from the aqueduct above. So that would have added to the atmosphere and provided additional privacy.” The pool was built during the reign of the Nabataean king Aretas IV (reigned 9 B.C.–A.D. 40) and continued to be used after the Romans annexed Petra in A.D. 106. Within a century, though, the Romans had begun to neglect its upkeep, and the pool started to fill up with soil and debris such as pottery and animal bones.
By JARRETT A. LOBELL
Friday, February 10, 2023
People had successfully been growing millet on northern China’s Loess Plateau for thousands of years when wheat was introduced to the region from the Near East around 4,000 years ago. This new crop brought both challenges and opportunities. “The central question is, did ancient farmers on the Loess Plateau who wanted to grow wheat also introduce new systems of irrigation to support it?” says archaeologist Xinyi Liu of Washington University in St. Louis.
To try to answer this question, Liu and an international team conducted archaeobotanical and isotope analysis of more than 30,000 grain seeds collected from Zhuanglang County in the western part of the plateau. The results showed that the wheat, unlike the barley—which was introduced at about the same time—showed no signs of water stress. Millet, and later barley, was grown only during summer months on hilly land when the monsoon season’s rainfall was usually adequate to supply the water required by these hardy crops. Wheat, on the other hand, which is water intensive and was originally a winter crop, could be grown in riverine environments, but required extensive human intervention. “Our results,” says Liu, “show that the introduction of wheat to China was accompanied by water management knowledge that was distinct from the previous rainfed cultivation.”
There is an assumption, explains Liu, that this knowledge must have concerned the type of large-scale irrigation found at sites in the Fertile Crescent and beyond, and that the requirements of this sort of system led directly to the formation of a state-run bureaucracy. Despite intensive archaeological investigation, however, no evidence of large-scale channel irrigation has been identified in the region.“The mismatch between the unequivocal evidence of well-watered wheat and the lack of evidence of channel irrigation suggests a local style of water management using strategic planting and small ditches,” Liu says. He believes that this mismatch itself is key evidence as it shows that water management was a bottom-up activity rooted in rural communities and not necessarily related to state bureaucracy. “Knowing what to plant in the proper place, such as growing wheat along rivers where water-retaining soil is plentiful and knowing that some simple ditches are enough to relocate water is sufficient,” Liu says. “Localized knowledge of the landscape can be as important a source of how to manage water as any introduced technology. And the knowledge itself becomes archaeological evidence.”
By JARRETT A. LOBELL
Friday, February 10, 2023
Since the Early Bronze Age (3000–2500 B.C.) and even into the present, a natural spring at Yalburt Yaylası in the pastoral highlands of Konya Province in central Turkey (ancient Anatolia) has been a place of deep human engagement with water. This fact was not lost on the rulers of the Hittite Kingdom, especially King Tudhaliya IV (reigned ca. 1237–1209 B.C.), who built a monument to himself at the site of the spring. The 42-by-25-foot limestone-lined pool was discovered in 1970 and has recently been restudied by archaeologists Ömür Harmansah and Peri Johnson of the University of Illinois Chicago, codirectors of the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project. The pool is one of the most important monuments from the Hittite Kingdom, which was centered in Anatolia but extended to the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. It is inscribed with a hieroglyphic Luwian text recounting the king’s military conquests in southwestern Anatolia.
Water was critical to the Hittites as a natural resource to support their agricultural and pastoralist society, but they also attached great religious and political importance to water and places associated with it. Harmansah explains that the Yalburt Yaylası monument, as well as dozens of others across the empire built on the sites of culturally prominent and symbolically important springs, stands as a testament to their beliefs. “These Hittite water monuments speak to religious and ritual practice and to how people relate to water, as well as to how those places are culturally significant and part of people’s identity,” he says. They are also an example of how the Hittite state constructed monuments associated with water to create imperial propaganda. “The Hittites understood springs as places of direct connection to the underworld and envisioned the point where water comes out of the rock as a portal through which to speak with their ancestors,” says Harmansah. “These places are so crucial that Hittite kings tended to sign international treaties at these springs so their ancestors could be witnesses. I can imagine Tudhaliya doing just that at Yalburt Yaylası.”
By JARRETT A. LOBELL
Friday, February 10, 2023
As they strolled through a colonnaded peristyle shaded from the blazing sun or admired the stunning frescoes covering the walls of their opulent home, the residents of the Villa Arianna would have prized their view of Mount Vesuvius not too far in the distance. But the volcano would ultimately cause their demise, as the same eruption that engulfed Pompeii in A.D. 79 also buried the villa, which once covered some 27,000 square feet and contained dozens of rooms and lush gardens. While reexcavating in one of the villa’s small peristyles, a team from the Archaeological Superintendency of Pompeii recently uncovered a perfectly preserved, decorated lead water tank and several pipes that had been part of the residence’s state-of-the-art water supply system. The tank would have remained at least partially aboveground to allow access to two shut-off keys used to regulate the flow of water throughout the property.
The Romans are well known for water management on a grand scale, most notably the miles-long arched aqueducts that supplied the city of Rome as well as much of their vast empire. They also excelled at managing water for domestic use, especially in luxury estates such as the Villa Arianna, where running water, copious fountains, swimming pools, and private baths were de rigueur.
By ERIC A. POWELL
Friday, February 10, 2023
The lavish water gardens built by the Mughal emperors, who held sway over much of South Asia from the sixteenth to nineteenth century, are some of the most fanciful and aesthetically pleasing waterworks of that era that visitors can still enjoy today. The seventeenth-century gardens at Agra that surround the Taj Mahal, for example, are the handiwork of Persian and Indian workers who endeavored to satisfy the luxurious tastes of their Mughal overlords. Founded by a Muslim royal clan from Central Asia that traced its lineage to Genghis Khan, the Mughals brought Persian-influenced Islamic aesthetics and gardening techniques to northern India, which already had a millennia-old tradition of building monumental wells. James Wescoat Jr., a landscape geographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that, initially, the Mughal rulers constructed gardens that were fed by narrow channels, a conservative approach to water use influenced by their origins in the deserts of Central Asia.
Mughal miniatures and paintings in books offer a window into how water gardens changed over time. One shows the first Mughal emperor, Babur (reigned 1526–1530), overseeing the creation of a garden in Kabul in modern Afghanistan that is fed by precisely laid narrow streams. Known as a charbagh, this type of garden is divided into four quadrants representing the four gardens of paradise described in the Koran. A later painting shows the Maharaja Bakhat Singh, a member of the princely Hindu clans known as Rajputs who often intermarried with the Mughals, celebrating with his harem during the festival of Holi in a large octagonal garden pool at the Mughal-Rajput citadel of Nagaur. “These later gardens are much more elaborate water displays,” says Wescoat. “It speaks to the later Mughal elite becoming more familiar with the Indian landscape.”
Wescoat notes that archaeology and paintings alike may obscure what might have been an important characteristic of such gardens. “The courtly entourages were very mobile,” he says. “Male members of the court were often traveling or prosecuting wars, but the women were more likely to stay in place. It’s interesting to think that the gardens might have been principally enjoyed by women, whose experience in these spaces was less likely to be painted or recorded.”
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement