Navigable canal and state irrigation network
Canal navegable y red de riego estatal
- Date
- c. 2400 BCE · confidence medium
- Place
- Girsu (Tello) and Umma, Sumer, Iraq
- Credited to
- Sumerian city-states (Entemena of Lagash)
- Field
- Tools
What it is
Large-section canals combining irrigation, barge transport and drainage, dug and maintained by corvée labour and documented in royal inscriptions. The Lagash-Umma canal dispute is the first recorded international conflict.
Wittfogel's 'hydraulic despotism hypothesis' is now much qualified: Sumerian irrigation predates the state and was partly managed by communities.
What it led to
- The hydraulic state: political power derived from control of the canals and of the labour to dredge them
- The first boundary treaty and the first documented war (Lagash-Umma, c. 2450 BCE)
- Cheap river transport of grain and brick that made cities of 50,000 inhabitants possible
- Progressive soil salinisation that ruined southern Mesopotamia around 1800 BCE
Built on
- Practical geometry and land surveyingc. 2500 BCE
- Neolithic irrigation channels
- Corvée
Made possible
- Shadufc. 2000 BCE
- Darius' Nile-Red Sea canalc. 500 BCE
- River barge
- Diversion sluice and weir
- Cadastre