Divine Channels: Rediscovering the Canal Networks of the Assyrian Empire
October 2021 | Vol. 9.10
By John MacGinnis, Daniele Morandi Bonacossi, and Jason Ur
The hilly flanks of the Taurus and Zagros mountains, with their temperate climates and reliable rainfall, proved the fertile setting for the domestication of crops and the first forays into agriculture in the Near East.
But other parts of the region were more challenging, and the invention of irrigation in southern Iraq in the sixth millennium BCE was a critical milestone in the history of humankind. Irrigation serves as force-multiplier. In the south of Mesopotamia it enabled the exploitation of land which was otherwise beyond the reach of the plow, while in the plains of the north it transformed the practice of dry farming – vulnerable to the precarious and unpredictable annual precipitation – into a dependable regime.
The countryside of Assyria, fertile plains against the majestic backdrop of the Zagros mountains. Photo courtesy of the authors.
Together these developments paved the way for the intensification of agriculture across vast tracts of land, laying the foundations for the surplus food production fundamental to the emergence of civilization. By the third millennium BCE, a wealth of textual evidence attests to the management of the canal systems, the cultures which they supported, and the conflicts which they generated. Later, a succession of empires – Assyrian, Parthian, Sasanian, Islamic – would invest massive resources on networks of canals that criss-crossed the land, supreme expressions of the subjugation of nature to the imperial mission.
Assyrian relief sculpture from the seventh century BC showing the operation of a shadouf, a pivoted device for raising water from a canal. ©The Trustees of the British Museum.
Assyrian canals
In this article we focus on the development of canals in ancient Assyria, in the north of present-day Iraq. An early, and possibly isolated, episode is in the eighteenth century BCE, during the brilliant if short-lived “upper Mesopotamian kingdom” – a polity perhaps just short of the threshold of empire – of Shamshi-Adad I (ca. 1809-176 BCE). A start was made on the creation of a canal east of the Tigris, but with the rapid disintegration of that empire the project was probably never actually completed.
The story really takes off in the Middle Assyrian period (roughly, fourteenth to eleventh centuries BCE). This is the period that saw the first growth of Assyria into a proto-empire, with Assyrian kings campaigning in all directions and establishing colonial implantations in northeastern Syria and southeastern Turkey. The expansionist background is important, as it is the increase in resources, and particularly the increase in the labor force from population groups deported from newly conquered territories, that triggered and enabled these endeavours. The very first key Middle Assyrian ruler, Aššur-uballiṭ I (1365-1330 BCE), boasts of his construction of the patti ṭuhdi – “the canal of abundance” – evidently dug in order to bring waters to his capital city, Assur. When, later, the king Tukulti-Ninurta I (1244-1208 BCE) moved the capital across the river Tigris to his new foundation Kar Tukulti-Ninurta I, he too supported it with a canal – the patti mēšari, “canal of justice”. In his words
I cut straight as a string through rocky terrain, with stone chisels I cleared a way through high and difficult mountains, I cut a wide path for a stream to support life in the land and provide abundance, I transformed the plains of my city into irrigated fields. From the produce of the waters of that canal I arranged for regular offerings for Aššur and the great gods my lords in perpetuity.
Inscription of Tukulti-Ninurta I celebrating the building of a canal to bring water to his new capital. Image courtesy of the authors.
These endeavours paved the way for the massive expansion of the canal system that took place in the Neo-Assyrian period. The process starts with Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BCE), and what is particularly exciting is that from this point on we are not only relying on the texts, but on a steadily increasing body of archeological evidence.
Statue of Ashurnasirpal II. ©The Trustees of the British Museum.
History of research
Elements of the Assyrian hydraulic landscape have been known for nearly two centuries, but not correctly interpreted or recognized as a system. Layard, for example, visited the massive aqueduct at Jerwan and assumed it was a stone bridge. The German scholar Walter Bachmann made drawings of the rock cut reliefs on the Zagros fringes, without recognizing that they often marked dams and weirs at the start of long canals.
Watercolor by Frederick Charles Cooper showing Austen Henry Layard at Khinis. From A Second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh, by Austen Henry Layard (1853). Public Domain, image courtesy of the New York Public Library.
Two early projects were pioneering for the modern study of Assyrian water systems. In 1934, the Oriental Institute team excavating at Khorsabad devoted a few weeks to researching the remains at Jerwan and its inscriptions. They correctly identified it as an aqueduct and placed it along a 95-kilometer canal from the canal head at Khinis to the imperial capital at Nineveh. Later, the archaeologist David Oates mapped the length of the canal from the Upper Zab river to the city of Nimrud, and used his map to calculate the economic impacts on the growth and maintenance of the city. Subsequently, Julian Reade recognized the close connection between reliefs and canals, based on his observations of the Faida canal.
Excavation carried out at the aqueduct at Jerwan by the Oriental Institute of Chicago in 1933. From T. Jacobsen and Seton Lloyd, Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan (Oriental Institute Publications 24, 1935), pl. 15.
Seton Lloyd’s reconstruction of the aqueduct at Jerwan. From T. Jacobsen and Seton Lloyd, Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan (Oriental Institute Publications 24, 1935), fig. 6.
Assyrian relief depicting an aqueduct plausibly identified as the one at Jerwan ©The Trustees of the British Museum.
Under the Ba’athist government of Iraq, field archaeology in the Kurdish fringes of the Assyrian core was discouraged if not outright prohibited. As a result, research was conducted from the skies. Using declassified satellite photos from the US CORONA spy satellite program, Ur produced an accurate map of the known canals and identified several new features. Ur and Reade remapped the Nimrud canal and proposed a new transportation function.
New discoveries in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq
Current archaeological research in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq is delineating a new picture of the massive irrigation systems built by the Assyrian kings of the eighth-seventh centuries BCE and their transformative impact on agricultural production in the empire’s core region. During the last decade wide-ranging landscape archaeology projects have been launched, focusing on the emergence of the Assyrian Empire in its core area and the impact it had on the transformation of the landscape in terms of settlement patterns, demography, infrastructure creation and ideological landscape transformation. In particular, the Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project (LoNAP) of Udine University and the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) of Harvard University are conducting broad surveys of the hinterlands of the last three imperial capitals, Nimrud, Khorsabad/Dur-Sharrukin and Nineveh, and of one of the most important provincial centres of the empire, Erbil/Arbail.
LoNAP is investigating the upstream part of the Northern Assyrian canal system located in the Duhok Governorate and has discovered new canals feeding the main channel built by Sennacherib from Khinis to the River Khosr and Nineveh. Moreover, to bridge wadis intersecting the canal’s course, Assyrian engineers not only built the famous Jerwan stone aqueduct, but constructed four other smaller aqueducts as well.
View from the west of the newly discovered Assyrian aqueduct on the Wadi Dar Basta from the west (Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project archive).
Near the modern town of Faida, an already known 8 km-long canal hewn into the bedrock at the foot of a low hill range was explored. Several offtakes distributed water into feeder channels irrigating the surrounding countryside. This shows that the Assyrian canals were excavated also for local irrigation. On the eastern canal bank, at least ten monumental panels have been carved in the limestone.
Faida, Reliefs Nos. 6-7, 8th-7th cent. BC (Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project archive).
Faida, Relief No. 4, 8th-7th cent. BC (Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project archive).
They depict a scene of divine adoration portraying an Assyrian ruler, probably Sargon II (721-705 BCE), represented twice in front of the cult statues of seven divinities standing on their emblematic animals.
The reliefs commemorated the creation of the new irrigation landscape designed by the king in his role of promoter of local fertility and abundance. At the same time, they were a powerful propagandistic tool and a strong ideological loyalty reminder to the population living in the area, which probably included resettled deportees from the Assyrian military campaigns whose allegiance to the crown might have been weak.
What do these new discoveries tell us?
An important point that we should emphasize is the transformative effect on the landscape and staple food production determined by the creation of massive irrigation systems in the imperial core. For the first time, combined research of LoNAP and EPAS provides archaeological proof that their construction brought about a shift from extensive low-productivity dry farming to an intensive predictable and high-yield cultivation system based on irrigation. The main purpose of the canal systems was not to supply water to Nineveh, Nimrud and Erbil (and their royal gardens and parks), but rather the irrigation of their hinterland, in a manner we normally associate with southern Mesopotamia.
CORONA image from February 1967, the white arrows indicating the course of the Ba’dreh canal (remote sensing and mapmaking Alberto Savioli).
Simultaneously, these features may have emulated another aspect of southern economies: water transportation. The construction of Assyrian cities involved the movement of very heavy items, especially bricks and stones, not to mention the occasional lamassu (sculpture of a winged bull with human head). The maintenance of dense urban population required agricultural produce, another bulky commodity. This growing network of canals provided a low-friction way of bringing resources and people together, in a way that had not been seen in northern Mesopotamia earlier.
The hydraulic system was more than just economic. Its monumentality and its ideologically charged reliefs sent a powerful message: the Assyrian king is divinely chosen to rule, he can move rivers, and he can make their waters available to you. This message was broadcast not only on the Zagros fringes, on the border with Urartu (as with the sculptures at Khinis and Maltai), but also in the very core of the imperial heartland. New research has revealed the high degree to which every Assyrian, whether indigenous or a recently arrived deportee, would have received this message.
How to cite this article:
MacGinnis, J., Bonacossi, D. M., and J. Ur. 2021. “Divine Channels: Rediscovering the Canal Networks of the Assyrian Empire.” The Ancient Near East Today 9.10. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/assyrian-empire-canal-networks/.
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