Development of large-scale irrigation agriculture in southern Mesopotamia

Date

c. 5300–4100 BCE

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

Southern Mesopotamia (Iraq)

Era

Prehistory

Significance

During the Ubaid period, communities in the alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia developed networks of canals and ditches to draw water from the Euphrates and Tigris onto fields of barley and emmer wheat.

Because rainfall was insufficient for reliable farming, this artificial irrigation produced large, storable agricultural surpluses for the first time in the region. The labour required to dig and maintain canals encouraged communal organisation and an emerging association between irrigation works and temple institutions, which managed storage and redistribution. Recent remote-sensing and field survey in the Eridu region has mapped an extensive preserved network of primary canals branching into thousands of secondary channels feeding hundreds of farm plots, illustrating the scale this system eventually reached. The surpluses generated by irrigation underwrote population growth, craft specialisation and the rise of the first cities, making intensive irrigation a foundational precondition of Sumerian civilisation.

Related science, technology & invention events

• The first copper smelting and the dawn of the Chalcolithic
  c. 5000 – 4600 BCE
• Invention of cuneiform writing at Uruk
  c. 3300–3100 BCE
• First canal irrigation at Choga Mami and the Samarra culture
  c. 6000 BCE
• Gunditjmara Build the Budj Bim Eel Aquaculture System
  c. 4600 BCE
• Invention of the potter's wheel in Mesopotamia
  c. 3500 BCE
• The ard plough and the Secondary Products Revolution
  c. 4500–3500 BCE

Also relevant

• The Clovis culture and its fluted points
  c. 13,000 years ago
• The Laetoli footprints capture early hominins walking upright
  c. 3.66 million years ago
• The Linearbandkeramik and the spread of farming into central Europe
  c. 5500 BCE

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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