Empire and environment in the northern fertile crescent

Abstract

Because of their huge size, empires are daunting for archaeological study. Although some features of early Near Eastern empires have been studied since the very earliest trenches were sunk into the Assyrian capital cities of Nimrud and Nineveh (Fig. 9.1), the implications of the development of territorial empires have not been fully absorbed into the study of human-environment relations. The later territorial empires of the first millennium BC and AD fundamentally changed the landscapes of the Near East in ways that did not previously obtain. For example, features of monumental scale (which are often associated with empires), and which include huge canal systems such as those of the Sasanians, necessarily had massive impacts on the environment, but more widespread, and ultimately perhaps more significant in terms of human impacts on the environment, are the smaller scale features that are often under-represented by archaeologists. This chapter relates the signatures of the cultural landscapes of the later territorial empires of the Near East to the local environment and landscape degradation. Empires provide the opportunity to relate sociopolitical processes explicitly to environmental conditions and more specifically to evaluate the links between humans and the environment. Nevertheless, because of their size and administrative complexity the recognition of causal links may be difficult. Territorial empires can be defined as territorially expansive polities in which a ruling power effectively controls and dominates a number of smaller and often weaker subordinate societies and their territories (Doyle 1986). In terms of the landscape, the royal household, ruling out of an imperial capital, has control of vast areas of terrain that can be transformed by the imposition of new patterns of settlement or by the introduction of technological innovations such as irrigation. By so doing, not only do the changes of settlement impact the landscape (by degrading it), innovations such as the introduction of irrigation, can result in the limitations of the environment being ignored or over-ridden. Examples are drawn primarily from the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Sasanian Empire in Iran, and the Seleucid, Roman and Byzantine empires in southern Turkey and northwest Syria. The chronological range is from around 900 BC through to the demise of the Abbasid caliphate in the tenth century AD (Table 9.1). The area dealt with in this chapter occupies that part of the Fertile Crescent in northern Syria, northern Iraq, and southern Turkey where agriculture is primarily dependent upon rainfall. Nevertheless, irrigation became increasingly important from the first millennium BC, and is common today, although frequently today this is at the expense of local water tables that are rapidly falling. Rainfall exceeds 700 mm/annum in the Amanus Mountains flanking the Amuq Valley in southern Turkey (Fig. 9.1), but falls to 300 mm throughout much of the Jazira located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and even less in the semidesert steppe that fringes the Syrian Desert to the south. Between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers the landscape consists of rolling uplands on Tertiary limestone, sandstone and occasional basaltic outcrops, separated by broad alluvial basins and river valleys, some of which are tributary to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Further west near the Mediterranean, the Amanus Mountains in Turkey and neighboring ranges in northern Syria are characterized by higher-energy erosional regimes than the steppe lands to the east. During the early and mid- Holocene (Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Bronze Age), settlement was primarily focused on the broader alluvial plains and valleys, but during the later territorial empires of the first millennium BC and later, settlement spread beyond these core areas into the uplands and out into the more climatically marginal areas of the steppe. Occasional reference is also made to southern Mesopotamia and SW Iran (Khuzestan) where irrigation is essential on the otherwise arid alluvial plains of the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Dez rivers. The excavation of sites belonging to the ancient empires stretches back to the very beginnings of archaeology and Assyriology, with the excavations by Layard and Botta in the Assyrian capitals of Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Nineveh (Larsen 1994). Only in more recent years have smaller settlements and their landscape context become the focus of investigations. For example, the pioneering studies of David Oates in northern Iraq and Syria focused on both the Neo-Assyrian remains of the first half of the first millennium BC, and also on the Parthian, Sasanian and Roman sites that followed (Oates 1968). Working during the initial years of aerial survey, pioneers such as Mouterde and Poidebard (1945), made the first strides in the mapping of central Syria, subsequently continued on the ground by Bernard Geyer and colleagues (Geyer and Rousset 2001; Geyer et al. 2007). In northern Syria a range of archaeological surveys and geoarchaeological investigations conducted since the 1980s have extended the range of data so that it is now possible to make generalizations from them (Ergenzinger et al. 1988; Wilkinson et al. 2005; Morandi Bonacassi 2000). During the early days of geoarchaeology, and even before the term had been coined, both Butzer (1964) and Vita-Finzi (1969) had emphasized the genesis of alluvial fills, albeit with rather different conclusions. Thus Butzer saw a more fine grained temporal record and more complex inter-relations between humans and the environment, whereas Vita-Finzi focused on region-wide climatic change as a causal factor. In the Near East, Rosen (1986), Brückner (1986), Goldberg (1998), Cordova (2000) and others have taken an approach similar to Butzer, and in recent years there has been an increasing tendency to focus upon the complexity of the relationship between humans and the environment and the role of humans in mediating some of the affects of climatic change (Rosen 2007). Similarly, Bintliff, whose approach originally closely followed that of Vita-Finzi, later adopted an approach that emphasized both human and climatic factors (Bintliff 1992, 2002). Although these pioneering studies were fundamental to the development of the field, because they focused upon the geomorphologic evidence and processes they frequently under represented the record of settlement, which in most studies remained unquantified. Moreover, for a variety of reasons some studies have only been able to focus on valley floor records at the expense of the valley slopes and interfluves that supplied the sediments for the valley floors (Beach and Luzzadder-Beach 2008). Not until the geoarchaeological record was studied in tandem with quantitative studies of settlement during the surveys of the 1980s and later has it become possible to gain a clearer cause and effect relationship between human settlement and associated physical responses (Casana 2008). The primary focus of this chapter is to bring together the results of such investigations over the past 30 years, with particular emphasis upon how the spread of settlement and water supply technology dur- ing the later empires contributed to our understanding of interactions between humans and the environment. Nevertheless, it is important to appreciate that settlement and land use configurations respond in many different ways to variations in rainfall, so that it is frequently difficult to separate the effects of climate and humans. In the narrative that follows, the primary attention is paid to the human circumstances that create the conditions for climatic change to operate. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.