Page 27 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

The Cities 9

The farmer of the immensely broad flat valley of the Euphrates
and the Tigris sees the flood as a catastrophe. If uncontrolled,
the waters will cover the land for months and never drain back to
the river. For the Euphrates at least runs in a bed carved out
of its own silt deposits, which often lies higher than the country
around. Both rivers can very well decide to cut a completely new
channel after the floods from the one they occupied before, and
the change in channel can drown cultivation, or leave it high
and dry, with its summer water supply miles away.
The problem for the first forgotten settlers of the south had
been to tame the Twin Rivers, as the Nile had never needed to

be tamed. And tamed they had been. Immense levees
strengthen the banks of the great rivers, and huge canals lead
off from them. The canals have a triple function. At the time
of high water they give the rivers room for controlled expansion,
leading off the dangerous waters. When the rivers begin to fall
sluice gates are closed, and the water is retained for use in the
dry period. And lastly the canals lead water to dry areas beyond
the natural coverage of the inundations. Fear of uncontrolled wa­

ter and a natural genius for harnessing it are as deeply ingrained
into the southern Mesopotamians as they are into the Dutch to­
day. A favorite theme of their storytellers is the mythical fight
between the god Enlil and the water monster Tiamat, in which
Enlil succeeds in subduing the monster to his will. And every
child knows of the Deluge, the great flood which had drowned
the world, all but Ziusudra, who had saved himself and his family
and his livestock in the ark which the gods had bade him build.
The Deluge is, in their minds, no mythical story, but a definite

historical event of the remote past—and indeed archaeologists
have found traces of catastrophic floods fifteen hundred to two
thousand years earlier than the period we here describe.
The farmers who, this first morning of the Second Millen­
nium b.c., are making their way out to their fields along the canal
levees of south Mesopotamia do not consider themselves the in­
habitants of a country. Egypt was the Two Lands, and, for all

the internal rivalries between them, their inhabitants felt them­
selves as one nation. But the Mesopotamian was first and fore­
most a citizen of his city. It was natural enough. He farmed im-