Water, power and culture in the Roman and Byzantine worlds: an introduction

Abstract

Roman mastery of hydraulic engineering, and in particular of long-distance aqueduct supply systems, enabled the growth of a distinctive urban culture characterised by public bathing and lavish water display in both public and private settings. In the rural sphere, the extension of empire around the Mediterranean facilitated, among other things, the transfer of irrigation technologies between regions of different cultural and geological back-grounds. This led to an increasing flexibility of responses to irrigation problems, and to the development of complex schemes incorporating elements of several technologies; the growing complexity and scale of both urban water supply and rural irrigation systems required the development of legislation to regulate usage and protect the rights both of the state and of individual users of the systems. The provision, and the control, of water supply and irrigation systems, and of water-using amenities such as fountains, bath-houses and ornamental pools, became a powerful political tool for rulers and elites, courting favour with the populace for whom these structures were provided, asserting control over the resources necessary to construct them, and sometimes over nature itself, or emphasising status distinctions by the possession of display fountains, private baths, or private latrines in one's own house. The Roman Empire, and to a considerable extent also the Byzantine Empire which succeeded it in the east, was marked by the conscious manipulation of water resources for both usage and display, especially in the urban landscape. The articles in this volume offer a variety of perspectives on the theme of water and power in the Roman and Byzantine Empires: legislation, control and management of urban water supply systems; administration of rural irrigation systems; the role of water-ways in the tax collecting system of Roman Egypt; and the extent to which various particularly Roman water technologies or habits were or were not adopted by subject population groups in the Near East. They derive from a workshop held at the University of Durham (UK) on 27– Advanced Study, with funding also from the Rosemary Cramp Fund of Durham University and the British Academy. Five articles from the conference were published in Water History 2.2 (October, 2010), a special issue edited by Tony Wilkinson and entitled Ancient Near East and Americas, and more detail on the aims of the workshop is provided there (Wilkinson 2010). The six articles in this volume derive from the second day, focussing on the Roman and Byzantine worlds. For much of the ancient world, and particularly for the ancient Near East, scholarly interest in the theme of water and power has typically concentrated on Wittfogel's (1957) model of Oriental despotism and hydraulic societies, in which the rise of a state bureau-cracy is considered necessary for the development of complex irrigation systems linked to large river systems, and control of those irrigation systems reinforces or even underpins the power of the state. Wittfogel's model has attracted much criticism, although there is evidence to suggest that ancient empires certainly enabled the spread and development of irrigation technologies, though not necessarily through direct bureaucratic control; part of the purpose of the Durham workshop and of the articles in the previous special issue entitled Ancient Near East and Americas was to reassess the question from first principles (Wilkinson 2010; Wilkinson and Rayne 2010, pp. 116–117). For the Roman Empire, the issues are somewhat different, and the Wittfogel thesis never gained much traction in Roman studies. In Egypt, the Roman state certainly did take over the Pharaonic and Ptolemaic link between taxation levels and the performance of the Nile flood regime, and elsewhere, especially in the Near East, Spain and North Africa, very large irrigation schemes did exist, but they were very different from the Mesopotamian riverine models discussed by Wittfogel. Increasing personal wealth on the part of regional elites, and a stronger legislative and institutional framework, enabled the creation of complex irrigation networks which brought together numerous private individuals without the state acting as the driving force. A particularly striking example is revealed by the recent publication of a second-century AD irrigation law from Roman Spain, the so-called lex rivi Hiberiensis, governing a large irrigation scheme in the Ebro valley, whose main channel took water from the river Ebro and ran for at least 20 km (possibly much more), involving users from three administrative communities or pagi belonging to two different municipalities (Beltrán Lloris 2006). The preserved parts of the law stipulate the duties of maintenance incumbent upon users of the system proportional to the amount of water they received, and regulate the procedures for managing conflict or disputes, in a council composed of the users of the system who exercised votes in proportion to their share of water rights. The council also met annually to decide on the irrigation schedule for the following year. Not all Roman irrigation schemes, however, were such large-scale ventures; they run the full spectrum between small, local systems and extensive regional schemes. A large number of medium-length channel and qanat systems were developed in the Roman and Byzantine Syria, often organised at the level of local communities, either towns or villages (Braemer et al. 2010; Wilkinson and Rayne 2010, pp. 122–123). This variety, coupled with the Roman-period development and spread of Hellenistic mechanical water-lifting technolo-gies, enabled the colonisation of new lands by smaller entities than the state, bringing irrigation technology within the reach of smaller farmers (Wilson 2002, pp. 7–9; 2003). The long verse inscription on the Mausoleum of the Flavii at Kasserine in Tunisia pro-claims, among other things, that T. Flavius Secundus was the first to introduce irrigated viticulture to the region (CIL 8.211 lines 51–53). For the majority of such systems, the involvement of the state was principally through providing the institutional and legal framework to protect property and water rights and to resolve conflict. In some cases, the state also provided institutional incentives encouraging the development of marginal lands, 2 A. Wilson