WATER HISTORY WEDNESDAY | EDITION 01

The importance of water bodies in early civilisation

Have you ever thought about our beginning? About how the first humans used water? How we knew what water to drink? What the quality of water was like? How it was stored?

Simmonds & Bristow are diving headfirst into the history of human’s relationship with water and how our hunter-gatherer ancestors progressed to the water and wastewater systems that we know today.

The first topic we’re going to be exploring is the formation of towns and cities in the ancient world. In our early days, humans understood the basic need for water as an essential requirement for survival. For a long time, humans foraged off the land and would move around only where we could access the resources we needed to survive.

In order to achieve much more, we would need to settle down, but that could only be achieved in an environment that provided us with everything we needed to survive. That’s why it comes as no surprise that the first evidence of a permanent settlement resided by water – the archaeological site of Jericho. Ancient Jericho, located northwest of present-day Jericho in the Jordan Valley in Palestine is a brilliant example of the transition of people from hunter-gatherers to a sedentary lifestyle in the Neolithic period. The site consists of an oval-shaped tell that contains archaeological deposits of human activities dating back to about 10,500 BC. Initially settled in 9000 BC, Jericho started as a hunter-gatherer base before it became an organised community that farmed wheat and barley in irrigated fields by about 8000 BC.

The advantages of Jericho’s positioning were a vital testament to the settlement’s survival. Jericho is located in an oasis in the middle of the Fertile Crescent – a fertile strip of land fed by the Tibre, Euphrates and Nile Rivers – and sustained by an incredibly dependable underground water supply known as the Ain es-Sultan. This constant availability of water enabled human life to sustain itself in Jericho. Even now, it is thought to have never dried up during its 14,000 years of continuous human residency.

Further south along the edge of the Fertile Crescent, sat another ancient settlement whose history is tied to the water body at its centre.

The Nile River in Egypt is a brilliant example of the importance of water supply in the early development of civilisation. With Egypt being settled on the edge of the river, the Egyptians soon realised that the Nile underwent an annual flooding event in late summer (during the August-September period). This event brought a surge of water that deposited new layers of silt around the river’s edge, resulting in fertile lands that made farming possible amid the desert. These timely floods were brought on by the monsoon-type rains in the Ethiopian highlands and the upper watershed of the White Nile around Lake Victoria.

They were able to grow wheat, flax, papyrus, and other crops around the Nile, helping them establish trade and playing a crucial role in the development of Egyptian civilisation. The annual flooding event paved the way for Egyptians to develop their own calendar, which they were able to use to start irrigation.

The Egyptians were able to use the consistent timing of the floods to their advantage. The Egyptian farmers developed a system called basin irrigation, using the rise and fall of the river for their water management. The farmers constructed a network of earthen banks both parallel and perpendicular to the river, that formed basins. When the river flooded, the channels would direct the floodwater into these basins where it would then sit for a month until the soil was saturated and ready for planting. At the time for farming, the remaining water would be drained off to a basin down-gradient or nearby canal so the farmers could plant their crops in the drained plot.

This seasonal flooding ensured that the land remained fertilised as new nutrients were deposited each year, eradicating any need for cyclical type farming or fallowing as seen in Mesopotamia during a similar time. The single season of planting did not overly deplete the soil, and the annual flooding meant that the land could be restored with the return of the silt and nutrient-rich floodwaters. In some basins, farmers planted grains and nitrogen-fixing legumes in alternative years, which helped maintain the soil’s productivity.

The river’s habitual flood became a steady and reliable source to sustain Egyptian farming methods and was even embedded in Egyptian culture through religion. The ancient Egyptian god Hapi, was the god of the annual flooding of the Nile. Hapi was greatly celebrated each year as he deposited the rich silt and the river bans, allowing the Egyptians to grow crops.

Further evidence of its importance lies in the famous historical relic The Scorpion macehead which is a decorated ancient Egyptian mace head that depicted one of the last predynastic kings, holding a hoe and ceremoniously cutting a ditch in a grid network. The discovery of this piece confirms that the Egyptians began practising some form of water management about 5,000 years ago.

Egypt, as we know it, was one of the most successful and productive civilisations of the ancient world, which can be largely accredited to the importance of its most famous waterway – The Nile River.