The Harappan, or Indus valley, civilisation is one of the oldest known urban cultures and was located within the Indus drainage basin to the west and north-west of the Thar Desert in what is now north-western India and Pakistan (Figure 2.1). The Harappan society is known to have suffered deterioration after around 1900 bc, which resulted in the abandonment of the large urban centres and the dispersal of the population. The causes of this change remain controversial but are often linked to climate change and especially to a weakening and a sustained low intensity of Asian summer monsoon rains at...

Egypt has been inhabited since the Palaeolithic (700,000 bc and perhaps before). During this long period, climate cycling on a whole range of timescales has continued, mediated in some cases by human activity and at other times wholly as a result of natural climate change. Some habitats are short-lived, for example those formed when a playa lake receives rainfall and vegetation germinates, attracting occasional visitors, or when the Nile floods and recedes, leaving cultivable land. In other cases, the kinder climate can persist for centuries, which means that permanent lakes and forests develop, supporting established, settled communities. Evidence of the...

Genetic studies and computational simulations have predicted that both the Middle and Lower Yangtze rivers were important places for rice domestication (Silva et al., 2015). While recent research has illustrated the cultivation, domestication and intensification processes of a rice economy in the Lower River Yangtze (Fuller et al., 2009; Gross and Zhao, 2014), the subsequent developmental trajectory of a rice economy in the prehistoric Middle River Yangtze remains unclear. Rice consumption began very early in this region (C. Zhang, 2000; Z. Zhao, 1998), which raises questions about how the transition from possible early cultivation to established rice farming took place...

The landscapes of the rural areas around the present Lake Taihu are dominated by the so-called poldered or dyked fields. These are paddy fields that are demarcated by artificial dykes inside large water bodies to prevent floods in the fields (Figure 5.1). Poldered fields were constructed during the medieval period (c. seventh century ad), if not earlier, and have been continuously maintained for rice farming (Bray 1984: 114) (Figure 5.2). Taking the local hydrological and soil conditions into account, this simple yet efficient means of water management has played a crucial role in the successful operation of these poldered fields...

The floodplain of the Tigris and the Euphrates is a relatively flat area with a low topographic relief, occupying a part of the foreland basin of the Zagros fold and thrust belt (Garzanti et al., 2016). On one hand, rivers in this region are unstable as they are commonly laterally shifted, completely or partially avulsed, seasonally flooded and occasionally desiccated (Morozova, 2005; Jotheri et al., 2016). On the other hand, this region is considered one of the origins of complex societies and has been continually occupied from the Mid-Holocene; here, people have relied on natural and constructed canals for life,...

Access to fresh water is one of the greatest global challenges of the twenty-first century. Scholars from different fields of research around the world are dealing with the ever-growing demand for, and the severe supply constraints upon, water. Rapid population growth and changing climatological conditions, especially in some of the most water-scarce regions of the world, result in increasing pressures on already overexploited water resources. This is especially the case in the arid and semiarid parts of the Middle East, North and sub-Saharan Africa, where almost all the water is used for agricultural purposes (see Gleick, 2014: 227–35, Table...

This chapter explores the specifics of the demand for water in the early Islamic city of Sultan Kala (ancient Merv), in modern-day Turkmenistan, and how it was organised and delivered. This discussion sits within a broader discourse on water, social complexity and religion (e.g. Dukhovny and de Schutter, 2011; Manuel et al., 2017; Smith, 2016; Willems and van Schaik 2015), as well as on the much-debated issue of water and the Asian state, which rose to prominence through Wittfogel’s hydraulic explanation of ‘Oriental despotism’ (Wittfogel, 1957, but see Davies, 2009; Harrower, 2009; Stride et al., 2009; Wilkinson and Rayne, 2010)....

Managing water systems over variable time and over changing environmental conditions requires water system management to be adaptive and to be able to evolve so that given water use systems can be sustained. This is the case with irrigation systems, where in dry regions issues of salinisation are often present (Fritsch and Fitzpatrick, 1994). In ancient Mesopotamia salinisation has been identified as an issue: overuse of water resources can result in salinised fields, and underuse of irrigation in underproducing fields (Jacobsen and Adams, 1958; Jacobsen, 1982). In effect, while irrigation is necessary in southern Mesopotamia for crop production, overdependence on...

Water is an essential element of cities, shaping culture, urban form, public health and environmental quality. Water infrastructures of drainage, supply and waste disposal are among the most ancient urban technical systems. Infrastructures are designed, built and managed according to physical laws and technical expertise, and they are subject to political, social and cultural choices. Culture, technology, nature and politics are all entwined in analysis, discussion and debate about urban water systems.

Urban water infrastructure can be conceived of as an assemblage of technologies, institutions, hydrological resources and ecosystems. Critical philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg (1993) links the social purpose...

This chapter focuses on early forms of community engagement with water and environmental control in ancient India as responses to environmental and climate-change challenges to human health and well-being, and the relevance of this material to global debates within contemporary environmental humanities and environmental health circles. It calls for those studying environmental events past and present to give greater thought to the religio-philosophical and epistemological roots of the historically specific human–environmental relationships that underlie our current environmental and climate-change crisis, and to question how differing attitudes towards the relationship between humans and non-humans may produce distinct environmental trajectories and...

I begin with a summary of Wittfogel’s hypotheses (Wittfogel, 1957). He termed societies whose agriculture depended on large-scale works of irrigation and flood control ‘hydraulic civilisations’, presenting them as different in kind from Western societies. He postulated the existence of absolutist managerial states, whose bureaucrats monopolised political (and by extension economic) power through the centralised control of irrigation works. He argued that in hydraulic civilisations labour was massed and forced and its products confiscated by the state. He identified ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China and pre-Columbian Mexico as ‘pre-eminent hydraulic civilisations’.

I now examine the reality of actual case studies...

The Three Kingdoms (fourth to seventh centuries ad) and Unified Silla (seventh to tenth centuries ad) periods in the Korean peninsula (Figure 13.1) witnessed the formation of complex relationship between environmental variables such as climate changes, in particular major (centennial) and minor (decadal) oscillations, and agricultural development in a highly complex society. The Three Kingdoms and the succeeding Unified Silla were kingdoms characterised by centralised administrative authorities, regulated taxation, an enlarged urban centre subject to systematic planning, the establishment of local administrative offices, and shared religious beliefs and ideologies (Barnes, 2015; Kwon, 2008). The Three Kingdoms practised advanced agriculture, with...

In 1989, one of the so-called ‘big three’ authors in the Netherlands, novelist and writer Willem Frederik Hermans, publishedAu Pair, his last important novel before he passed away in 1995 (Hermans, 1989). In the book, Hermans presented the story of a Dutch girl who becomes an au pair – how could it be otherwise, given the title? – in Paris, the city where the author lived at the time. The book received rather mixed reviews, to say the least. Some reviewers considered it to be a great piece of storytelling and even to offer theoretical insights into human societies...