First canal irrigation at Choga Mami and the Samarra culture

Date

c. 6000 BCE

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

Mesopotamia (Iraq)

Era

Prehistory

Significance

In central Mesopotamia, on the margins of the rain-fed zone, Samarran communities such as Choga Mami in the Diyala region built some of the earliest known irrigation canals around 6000 BCE.

By cutting channels — some reportedly several kilometres long — to lead river water onto fields, farmers could grow wheat, barley and flax in drier lowlands beyond the reach of reliable rainfall, dramatically expanding the cultivable landscape. Irrigation demanded planning, surveying and the coordinated labour of larger groups to dig and maintain the works, fostering new forms of social organisation. These techniques, developed in the Samarra and related cultures, were carried south into the alluvial plains during the subsequent Ubaid period, where large-scale watering of the land underpinned the dense populations and emerging towns that would eventually give rise to the first cities. Controlled irrigation was a foundational technology of Mesopotamian civilisation.

Related science, technology & invention events

• Earliest milk processing: the dawn of dairying
  c. 6500–6000 BCE
• Development of large-scale irrigation agriculture in southern Mesopotamia
  c. 5300–4100 BCE
• Earliest wheeled vehicles in Mesopotamia
  c. 3300–3000 BCE
• Domestication of maize from teosinte in Mesoamerica
  c. 7000 BCE (c. 9,000 years ago)
• The first copper smelting and the dawn of the Chalcolithic
  c. 5000 – 4600 BCE
• Independent agriculture at Kuk Swamp, New Guinea highlands
  c. 7000–5000 BCE (c. 9000–7000 years ago)

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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