The most traumatic symbol of Islamic civilization’s decline was the devastating Mongol sack of Baghdad on February 20, 1258. Mounted Mongol warriors, using gunpowder-fired weapons in their relentless surge of conquest across the Eurasian steppes from China to the Near East to the doorstep of central Europe, stormed the once-illustrious city to loot, burn, pillage, and slaughter. In customary Mongol fashion, hundreds of thousands of residents were massacred. The last caliph, in a calculated symbolic act of contempt, was trampled to death under the hoof of a Mongol horse. The obliteration of the Abbasid capital was completed by the destruction of many surrounding irrigation dikes and waterworks to render impossible any agricultural resurrection. It was the first time that non-Muslim invaders had been able to impose infidel rule in the Islamic heartland. Christian Europe was spared a similar agonizing fate as that experienced at the hand of the Mongols by both Islam and China only due to a fluke of history. News of the death of Genghis’s son and successor, Ogadei, had reached the banks of the Elbe River during the 1241 conquests when Europe lay prone for the taking. Mongol commanders, uncertain how the power vacuum in Karakorum would be filled, voluntarily pulled back their forces into Russia. Eventually they invaded other regions, and looked beyond the relatively meager wealth of medieval Europe for richer prizes.
Yet Islamic civilization had been in critical decline long before the arrival of the vanquishing Mongol cavalry. Like the Persian and Byzantine empires overrun by the first Arab armies of the seventh century, the foundation of its economic prosperity had grown internally stagnant. A principal cause was faltering water management and its inability to keep technologically ahead of its inherent scarcity of freshwater resources. The agricultural productivity of Mesopotamia, for instance, deteriorated markedly with the rising political influence of Islam’s nomadic converts who increasingly supplied the Arab caliphate’s military manpower. Most notable of these were the Turks, who held effective power in Baghdad after 1055 under the nominal leadership of the Abbasids. Dependency on the Turks was a consequence of the limitation water scarcity had imposed on the size of the ruling native Arab population. While the Abbasid dynasty’s founders had arduously rebuilt and maintained irrigation waterworks on the Tigris-Euphrates and Nahrwan canal system and had expanded cultivated cropland to its largest extent into the eleventh century, the recently nomadic Turks were steeped in the traditions of steppe herders who followed their sheep and horses between water holes and seasonal grasslands. Under Turkish influence, centralized political authority waned and Mesopotamia’s irrigation system eroded. Inadequate maintenance caused irrigation and drainage canals to clog with silt. Soils became waterlogged and deadly salt rose to the surface of the floodplains between the twin rivers. As in ancient times, salt-whitened fields produced falling agricultural yields and declining population levels.
Deteriorating irrigation maintenance also helped cause both the Euphrates and the Tigris to make major disruptive course shifts around the year 1200. The Tigris’s return to its former, more easterly channel north of Baghdad was a twin disaster because not only did this realignment dry up a large tract of irrigated cropland, but it also destroyed part of the 400-foot-wide Nahrwan transport and irrigation canal and the agricultural network it supported downstream. The agricultural decline in Mesopotamia coincided with a parallel shrinkage and collapse by the twelfth century of irrigation in Egypt. Thus both of the Islamic world’s great breadbaskets fell into crisis at the same time. As always, the level of Nile floods was the key determinant of Egyptian prosperity and the political system that depended upon it. Ample Nile floods had buttressed the first three centuries of Arab rule. A period of low Nile floods between 945 and 977, however, eroded the amount of land under cultivation and paved the way for the conquest of Egypt by the Shiite Fatimids in 969. Fatimid rule was eventually undermined by two generations of low Nile floods that produced cannibalism, plague, and decaying waterworks. In 1200 one-third of Cairo’s population perished from severe famine when disastrous low floods returned after a long period of normality. This catastrophe fueled the enduring Egyptian suspicion that the upriver emperors of Ethiopia somehow had made good on their threat to divert the Nile’s waters. By the time the Mamluks, white Muslim slave soldiers of ethnic Turkish origins, seized power in Egypt in 1252, irrigated agriculture had fallen into such desuetude that the Nile breadbasket was able to support no greater population than the one Arab conquerors had inherited from the Byzantines in the seventh century. The revival of Nile irrigation awaited the water engineering projects of the Turkish and British overlords in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In Muslim Spain the problem was less one of waterworks deterioration than of a failure to innovate to find more efficient ways to exploit their existing water resources. When the Christian Europeans reconquered Spain, they inherited an extensive irrigation network with highly developed social and administrative processes—including the famous water court at Valencia, the oldest democratic institution in Europe, whose elected judges have adjudicated irrigation disputes in public for over a millennium. But it was entirely based on Middle Eastern traditions of small-scale river diversion dams for irrigation, water-power, and water supply. Muslim engineers had ample familiarity with large impoundment dams and aqueducts used in Spain by the ancient Romans. But they never experimented with them in order to improve their water use productivity. Their Christian successors did. Their successful innovations helped Spain flourish after 1492 when the armies of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelled the last Moors from the Iberian Peninsula.
Photographic Insert
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Lifting, damming, and channeling water has often made the difference between agricultural surplus and famine. Water-lifting irrigation devices, such as the workhorse Middle Eastern noria or chain of pots (1) and Archimedes’ screw (2), have remained in continuous use since antiquity. Handbuilt, water-storage earthen dams, like the one being reinforced by rural Kenyan villagers in 2004 (3), were mainstays of Egyptian and Mesopotamian hydraulic civilizations five millennia ago.
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Wet rice farming requires intensive and sophisticated water management. Nineteenth-century Chinese farmers sow rice and move water on wooden treadle pumps according to traditional methods.
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A highland Ethiopian farmer in 2008 plows his field in a manner virtually unchanged since the start of civilization.
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Two notable vessels of the seafaring Mediterranean world were the ancient Greek’s nimble warship circa 480 BC, the trireme (6), with its deadly pointed ram at the bow, and the lumbering Roman cargo ship circa AD 200 (7) that transported goods from the far reaches of the empire to feed the enormous imperial capital.
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Marcus Agrippa (8), Augustus’ lifelong right-hand man, transformed the empire’s health, military robustness, and civic society by institutionalizing the public supply of abundant, clean water through extensive aqueducts, such as the remnant at the Pont du Gard in southern France (9), to urban fountains, baths, and functioning sewers.
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Li Bing built sophisticated waterworks, like the still-functioning Min River diversion weirs in Sichuan, that spread prosperity and helped the Ch’in dynasty consolidate power throughout China in the third century BC.
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The completion of the 1,100 mile Grand Canal (11) in the seventh century AD united the resources of the south’s Yangtze and the north’s Yellow River and catalyzed China’s spectacularly advanced medieval civilization. The New Grand Canal in the early fifteenth century signaled the nation’s fateful turn inward and voluntary withdrawal of its indomitable fleets from the high seas. A traditional seagoing Chinese junk (12).
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Islam’s glorious age, from the eighth to twelfth centuries, was built upon a vast trading network of desert-crossing camel carava
ns (13) and lateen sail-rigged, cargo-carrying dhows (14), which spanned from Atlantic Spain across the Indian Ocean and south along Africa’s coasts and interior river civilizations. Yet Islam’s arid homeland’s shortage of small rivers limited its use of waterwheels for power and irrigation, like the one functioning on the Orontes River at Hama, Syria (15), in the early twentieth century, and contributed to its rapid decline from world prominence after the twelfth century.
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The heavy moldboard plow, widespread in northwestern Europe by the tenth century, was one of the seminal innovations of the region’s agricultural revolution and belated economic rise.
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Northern Europe’s many navigable and fastrunning rivers became arteries of commerce and production. Waterwheel-powered bread flour gristmills, like this old wooden waterwheel mill in northwestern France, were ubiquitous.
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Water power was applied most notably to medieval industrial production, including rolling iron, as shown at this 1734 Swedish mill, and to drive huge leather bellows to heat furnaces for high-volume iron casting.
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Europe’s world dominance began after 1500 with the advent of transoceanic sailing and long-range naval cannonry, which followed the Voyages of Discovery championed by Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator. Vasco da Gama (19) sailed around Africa’s cape to India, and Columbus crossed the Atlantic to the New World, with the help of the discovery ship par excellence, the caravel (20).
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The apogee of naval power in the age of sail was achieved by England, whose two greatest admirals, Francis Drake and Horatio Nelson (21), helped defeat the Spanish Armada and Napoléon, respectively. A 120-cannon French warship (22) from the Nelson-Napoléonic era.
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In 1763, James Watt (23) began repairing this model of Newcomen’s early steam engine (24). The result was the modern steam engine, the seminal invention of the Industrial Revolution.
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Powerful steam engines, like Watt’s rotary motion 1797 model, superseded waterwheels to drive the world’s great early automated factories and iron mills that underpinned the world dominance of the nineteenth-century British empire.
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Robert Fulton’s (27) Clermont (26) on New York’s Hudson River ushered in the age of river steamboats. Fulton’s vigorous advocacy for American canals also helped spur the development of the Erie Canal.
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Forsaken in love, the Duke of Bridgewater focused his energies on pioneering the building of a canal in 1761 from his coal mine to Manchester. His success ignited a national canal-building boom that transformed England’s economy.
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America’s visionary canal builder was New York’s De Witt Clinton (29), who celebrated the 1825 completion of the Erie Canal with a ceremonial wedding of the Lake Erie’s water with the Atlantic Ocean at the Hudson River’s mouth. By providing an economical east-west route across the Appalachian Mountains, the 363-mile-long Erie Canal (30) transformed America’s destiny by linking New York and the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi Valley and the vast resources of the continental interior.
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The arrival of abundant, clean freshwater from a new aqueduct network in upstate Croton in 1842 relieved celebratory New Yorkers of their chronic water scarcity and affliction by waterborne diseases.
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English leader Benjamin Disraeli championed the sanitary reforms that triggered the industrial world’s public health revolution. Disraeli later seized the opportunity that enabled England to gain influence over the vitally strategic Suez Canal, which linked the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
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The entrepreneurial genius behind the 1869 Suez Canal was French Viscount Ferdinand de Lesseps. De Lesseps’ later effort to build an interoceanic canal between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans failed, but galvanized events that ultimately led to the creation of the Panama Canal.
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The driving force behind the Panama Canal was America’s greatest water president, Teddy Roosevelt (35), who got behind the controls of huge steam shovel (34) during his heralded visit to the canal zone to make good on his promise to make “the dirt fly.” The first steamer sailed through the canal’s famous Culebra Cut in August 1914 (36).
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Dust storms, like the one of April 14, 1935, approaching Rollo, Kansas, and created partly by man’s mismanagement of a fragile water environment, ravaged the plains during the Great Depression. Pumping water accumulated over eons in huge, deep underground aquifers soon transformed the Great Plains into one of world history’s great breadbaskets, but raised doubts about its long-term sustainability.
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“I came, I saw, I was conquered …” President Franklin Roosevelt’s September 30, 1935, dedication (38) of the Boulder (later renamed Hoover) Dam (39) inaugurated one of the great eras of water history. Giant, multipurpose dams transformed America’s arid Far West, helped the country win World War II, and spread the worldwide Green Revolution.
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Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was adulated by Arabs throughout the Middle East. He triggered a crisis with the great Western powers when he nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and contracted with the Soviet Union to construct the multipurpose high dam on the Nile at Aswan, a project he likened to the great pyramids.
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Like great dynastic founders throughout Chinese history, Mao Zedong launched massive development waterworks to reengineer China. Today, the nation has nearly half the world’s 45,000 large dams, including the controversial super giant at Three Gorges on the Yangtze, and a continentalscale south-to-north river water diversion scheme.
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Water development has come much more slowly for two poor rural Kenyan villagers, who in 2004 laid a two-mile-long water pipe that finally brought clean, fresh water to their village from a rural well after a thirty-year wait.
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Rachel Carson’s (43) Silent Spring, highlighting the extensive toxic pollution of waterways, was one of the seminal birth moments of the modern environmental movement. Congress was finally galvanized to enact comprehensive clean water regulations after Cleveland’s filthy Cuyahoga River, seen burning in 1952 with industrial pollution (44), again burst into spectacular flames in June 1969.
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Climate change, energy, and food issues are intimately interconnected with water. Retreating mountain glaciers from global warming, such as those that sustain Asia’s great rivers and a fourth of humanity, threaten catastrophic droughts and hydroelectricity shortages in the dry season and devastating floods during the monsoons.
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One fifth of humanity still lacks access to enough clean, fresh water for basic domestic needs and two-fifths for adequate sanitation, compelling hundreds of millions, especially children (46) and women, to forgo education and productive work to walk several miles each day to fetch water for daily survival. Billions in poor regions with inadequate water infrastructure, like Ethiopia’s highlands near Lake Tana (47) at the source of the Blue Nile, try to endure water’s natural destructive excesses, such as floods, mudslides, and droughts.
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With freshwater use increasing twice as fast as soaring world population growth, a perilous new planetary era of water scarcity is dividing global society and politics between fresh-water Haves and Have-Nots, and establishing a fifth, vital historical use for water—to sustain the earth’s lifegiving water ecosystems.
Another major water fragility that undermined Islamic civilization was its shortage of small rivers. Islam’s “stream deficit” not only inhibited its development of a speedy, safe, and extensive internal transport network. It also handicapped Islam in exploiting one of the rising sources of potential co
mpetitive advantage during the Middle Ages—waterpower. Although Muslim hydraulic engineering knowledge was more advanced than in Europe, the waterwheel never played as important a role simply because of its natural shortage of fast-flowing streams. At a time when rival Europe was learning to apply the abundant waterpower and transport potential of its many small rivers to the development of the early industry that helped drive its historical ascendancy, Islamic Spain continued to use the waterwheel almost exclusively for grinding grain and lifting water. The use of energy derived from waterpower was a seminal factor in the development of early industry. By the mid-twelfth century, Europeans had already attained parity with Islam in waterpower.
Steven Solomon Page 17
