ABSTRACT
T he Victorians thought of Mesopotamia (Greek for “land between the rivers”) as the location of the biblical Garden of Eden. Today, it is a far from paradisal place, for the delta regions and floodplain (Figure 15.1) between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers form a hot, low-lying environment, much of it inhospitable sand, swamp, and dry mudflats. Yet this now inhospitable region was the cradle of the world’s earliest urban civilizations (Table 15.1) (Matthews, 2003; Pollock, 1999; Postgate, 1992). From north to south, Mesopotamia is approximately 965 km (600 miles) long and 400 km (250 miles) wide, extending from the uplands of Iran to the east to the Arabian and Syrian deserts in the west. The plains are subject to long, intensely hot summers and harsh, cold winters, and would be desert but for the Euphrates and Tigris. There are few permanent water supplies other than these great rivers and their tributaries. Rainfall is slight, undependable, and insufficient for the growing of crops. But with irrigation, the alluvial soils of the lower plain can be farmed and their natural fertility unlocked. Farmers can obtain high crop yields from relatively limited areas of land, sufficient to feed relatively dense populations. By 6000 b.c., and perhaps earlier, village farmers were diverting the waters of the rivers. Within 2,000 years, the urban civilization of the Sumerians was flourishing in Mesopotamia (Maisels, 1993, 2001).
