ACADEMIA SUMMARIES

Steven Mithen Thirst For Water and

Power in the Ancient World Harvard
University Press (2012)
The original paper contains 192 sections, with 10 passages identified by our machine learning
algorithms as central to this paper.

Paper Summary
SUMMARY PASSAGE 1

Section 1
x T H I R S T 7.2 Changing seasonal water ow at Dujiangyan (a er Gillet and Mowbray 2008) 163 7.3
Irrigation of Chengdu Plain by the Dujiangyan scheme, based on a Qing Dynasty depiction 164
showing the fangs, streets and canals (a er Du and Koenig 2012) 168 8.1 Barays (reservoirs), canals,
rivers and a selection of temples at Angkor, referred to in Chapter 8 (a er Fletcher et al. 2008) 177 9.1
Irrigation canals of the Hohokam in the Salt River Basin (based on maps within Pueblo Grande
Museum, Phoenix) 207 9.2 Hohokam irrigation system components (a er Masse 1991) 208 10.1
Maya sites referred to in Chapter 10 225 10.2 Schematic settlement plan of Tikal showing location of
reservoirs (a er Lucero 2006) 234 10.3 Schematic plan showing canals at Edzná (a er Matheny et al.
1983) 238 10.4 Lid of Maya vessel depicting frog emerging from water (a er Bonnafoux 2011) 243
11.1 Pre-Inca and Inca sites of the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu referred to in Chapter 11 264
11.2 Terraces and canals at Tipón (a er Wright 2006) 275 1 e Hoover Dam, seen from the Mike
O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge (Copyright © Steven Mithen) 2 e 19,600-year-old site of
Ohalo, located on the shore of Lake Tiberias, undergoing excavation in September 1999. e remnants
of a circular hut can be seen in the lower le of the picture (Copyright © Steven Mithen) 3
SUMMARY PASSAGE 2

E Land Between The Rivers

e rst farming villages in Southern Mesopotamia are more recent than the Levant, 5000 bc at the
earliest. is is not surprising because the irrigation-based farming required to develop the land is more
challenging to develop. And yet it was here rather than in the Levant or Northern Mesopotamia that
the rst civilisation emerged.

SUMMARY PASSAGE 3

Foundations: Ubaid And Uruk

Although our knowledge of the speci c changes in settlement patterns and chronology of events
remains limited, within a few hundred years around 3900 bc, the foundations for the Sumerian
civilisation had been laid: urban communities, monumental architecture, public art, centralised rather
than household production, extensive trade networks. Water management for both irrigation and
canal transport provided the foundations for this earliest civilisation in the world. e development of
technology and cra s had also played a key role in this cultural transformation.

SUMMARY PASSAGE 4

Discovering Angkor
On my visit I had le the tumbling tree-clad buildings of Ta Prohm and followed a tiny path through the
surrounding woods, where I found the encircling moat: it was several metres wide and contained
some glistening water, re ecting the peak of the temple that rose above the trees. All of the Angkor
temples are surrounded by such moats, although few contain water today; many temples also have
rectangular pools nearby, of which the West Baray is simply the largest. Why was there such a need
for water?

SUMMARY PASSAGE 5

Finding A Hydraulic City Amid The Temple Ruins

e rst was the Russian-born Victor Goloubew (1873Goloubew ( -1945, who pioneered the use of aerial
photography. By revealing extensive canals and reservoirs, this began to expose what had been a
hidden secret of the Angkor ruins: a large number of complex hydraulic works. Goloubew suggested
that these had served both a ritual and a practical purpose, the latter being the irrigation of rice elds
during the dry season.
SUMMARY PASSAGE 6

Challenging The Hydraulic-City Hypothesis

One of his key arguments was that in recent times Cambodia has supported a population at least
three times the maximum estimate for Angkor -the country had a population of around six million in
the middle of the twentieth century. at population was sustained by rice farming with no recourse to
hydraulic engineering -neither massive reservoirs nor irrigation canals. So why would hydraulic
engineering for irrigation have been necessary when the Angkor kings had ruled?

SUMMARY PASSAGE 7

E Hydraulic City Maintains Its Ow

at it was not perfectly designed as a whole, as Robert Acker has argued, should come as no surprise
-the nature of complex systems is that they are constantly modi ed and tinkered with. ey also
frequently serve multiple functions. is certainly appears to have been the case for the hydraulic
system at Angkor: it controlled the monsoon ood waters when these were excessive, irrigated the rice
elds during the dry season and captured su cient water for the creation of the heavenly lakes of the
gods on earth.

SUMMARY PASSAGE 8

Hohokam Irrigation In The American South-West, Ad 1-1450

Buried below the tarmac of the runways, the terminals and the re station are the in-lled ditches and
canals that had once irrigated the desert. 1 ese had been made by the Hohokam people,
constructing their rst canals close to the start of the rst millennium ad, when they lived in small
villages adjacent to the Salt and Gila rivers in what would become Arizona. Within a few hundred
years they were living in settlements that housed 1,000 people; they had monumental architecture,
elaborate material culture, and far-reaching trade networks.

SUMMARY PASSAGE 9

Irrigation And Civilisation Before The Incas

Excavations in 2005 in the Zuña Valley, 60 kilometres east of the Paci c coast ( Figure 11.1), by
Professor Tom Dillehay from Vanderbilt University and his colleagues found the earliest known
evidence for irrigation in the whole of the Americas, North and South. A sequence of four
superimposed irrigation canals between one and four kilometres in length were discovered, the
earliest of which dates to at least 3400 bc and most likely 4500 bc. is is more than 3,000 years earlier
than the canals in the Tucson Basin that may have inspired the Hohokam (Chapter 9).
SUMMARY PASSAGE 10

Partial And Biased

Remote sensing, including imagery derived from the space shuttle missions, has already made a
contribution to revealing the canal systems of Mesopotamia and Angkor. is has a great deal more to
o er, while the ongoing re nement of chronological sequences by the further application of
radiocarbon dating remains a priority. Such dating is essential to relate cultural developments to
those of environmental change, especially as derived from tree rings that can reconstruct the history
of oods and droughts in such detail, as we have seen with the Hohokam and at Angkor.