ABSTRACT
There is no denying that several of the world’s pristine civilizations developed in environments similar to Mesopotamia where the production of food surpluses, and hence the emergence of a wealthy, stratified society, was dependent on irrigated agriculture. From his viewpoint in China, this led C. Wittfogel to attribute the increased complexity of such societies to the managerial imperatives imposed by the need to organize a large-scale irrigation system. This is a seductive hypothesis, and we shall see that in Mesopotamia large institutions could profit from the regime of the rivers; but it is no longer fashionable to see the need to administer irrigation as the chief formative influence – the ‘prime mover’ – converting a society of villages to one of cities, and indeed closer inspection of the third-millennium evidence does suggest that the irrigation system was in the hands of the traditional local authorities, not the creation of a newer political order.
The dependence of the water supply on the changing river regime, at one level, and on human organization at another, creates over the long term an impermanence in land conditions. Nevertheless, it does not reduce the importance of land as the primary ‘means of production’, merely increases its impact on the processes of social change. Athough much valuable detail has been recovered from the texts about the forms of land tenure and procedures through which changes in the system were made, these are no more than the framework within which major changes in property rights were at work, and basic questions remain to be solved before we can understand what was really going on.
