Drone photos reveal an early Mesopotamian city made of marsh islands | Hacker News Reader

Drone photos reveal an early Mesopotamian city made of marsh islands

sciencenews.org

67 pointsdiodorus29 comments

If you’re interested in the history of Lagash and the wider Sumerian civilization, I highly recommend the _Fall of Civilizations Podcast_ episode 8.

https://youtu.be/d2lJUOv0hLA

At 2.5 hours it’s more like an audiobook. During the pandemic this was my gateway into learning a ton about this ancient civilization, when humanity first began to write and thus be able to communicate with us thousands of years later.

Also highly recommended from the same podcast: the episode on the Han Dynasty. Chinese history is such a fascinating and underexplored topic in "the West", most of what's in that episode was new to me.

I second that recommendation. Fall of civilization is really well done, their Petra episode is another good one.

... and all of this is possible because Turkey took advantage of the disarray in Iraq and Syria over the last 20 years and built large dams and aqueducts on the upper Tigris and Euphrates rivers, drastically reducing their flows and causing water levels in Southern Iraqi marsh lands to almost entirely dry up.

It's a humanitarian catastrophe.

Not to say that we should not use this opportunity to do critical archeology. In fact, this situation may not last, so we should invest in digs asap.

...but it is still important to understand the nature of why these sites are being discovered now.

Dams don't 'dry up' rivers - they control them. The lake created doesn't have infinite capacity. Once filled, the flow downstream resumes normal levels. Just doesn't have floods like it used to.

Where I live, we then drain those lakes regularly for the water of our cities so the water available down stream is greatly reduced except in tons of flood in which case it is unusually high.

The Mediterranean would dry up if the Straits of Gibraltar closed up. That’s some very large fraction of all rivers in Europe plus the biggest in Africa that never actually make it to the Atlantic. Evaporation is the cause.

This is untrue. You aren’t thinking about the effects of sediment, usage, and erosion. When you build a dam and allow the riverbeds to dry, it changes the entire water table of the region.

It also blocks animal migration.

They don't dry; they resume as normal once the dam is complete.

I don't understand that nobody can see this. The lake can't hold all the water to inifinity. Once it's full, the outflow becomes normal. Except now you can regulate it.

The marshes were drained by Saddam to punish the local population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draining_of_the_Mesopotamian_M...

Do we fully understand why prehistoric human wanted to live on these watery sites? I find it so hard to understand, since living on dry land and avoiding marshes is a strongly ingrained idea now.

But there are so many archeologic sites like this, is must have had a strong appeal. For example, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Must_Farm_Bronze_Age_settlem...

Access to food sources, maybe? Compared to most terrestrial game, fish are easier to catch and provide a plentiful source of protein.

The Uros people moved from land to fabricated islands on Lake Titicaca to escape Incan conquest. The Aztecs created islands to have more productive farmland. Likewise the Incas when creating Cusco in a marshy valley.

Every American midwest town is on a river. Because the pioneers needed water, every day. Carrying water is a huge chore.

It is not only a huge chore, but you can only go a short distance from water before the time to transport is uses every productive hour of labor. No time to grow food or make things.

We still need water, and living on the river is still the most sustainable source of it, plus the incredible amounts of transportation you can do inland with rivers out matches roads by a thousand times.

I would never not live on a river. The ocean is cool and all, but it's full of salt and you can't drink that.

Rivers provided water, yes, but also transportation. Some prior to the development of steam, but especially with steamships, at which point major river systems, and most notably the Mississippi-Missouri, became the first great internal highway system.

This is why the port of New Orleans was so significant in both the War of 1812 and the American Civil War: it controlled all commerce out of the North American / U.S. interior.

Cities are almost always built next to water, even today. Before long roads existed connecting distant places, waterways were also the only way to transport things faraway. It was much, much easier to load a boat with stuff and paddle it or use wind to move it, than it was to try to build much more complex horse-pulled vehicle that could move long distances in the absence of roads (imagine a charrot moved around on plant-covered terrain or even worse, sand).

Given how big shipping is for international trade, I'd say that being next to and having control of waterways is even more important today. Especially given this more or less global drought.

Because early agriculture was all about planting things in flood plains... If you live on a flood plain you get automatic irrigation, all the nutrients in the soil get replenished every year, you get some fish, etc...

Most ancient civilizations (and certainly the ones that became the most populous) were built on flood plains. It took quite a few technological advances (Rome's aqueducts for example) and new agriculture techniques before civilizations thrived in other locations.

More consistent access to water and protection from large cats. But that is just a guess.

Keep in mind that sea levels were rising during much this period as the last glaciation was ending. Such that regions which are presently brackish marshes would have been riverside developments, and quite possibly far less marshy.

Vivec City (Morrowind / Elder Scrolls Online) vindicated. Ancient Mesopotamia is so fascinating. Isn’t it?

They really couldn't come up with a better name for that than "remote sensing"?

That term has been used as far back as the 60s, based on my personal library.

Slightly earlier, though yes, it largely came into vogue with the emergence of satellite reconnaissance and observations.

Google Ngram Viewer: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=remote+sensing...>

Fair, I've always heard the term in reference to psychics.

Atlantis?

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