They raised sheep, goats, donkeys, cattle, and pigs and caught fi sh in the canals. There was more than enough for the farmers and herders to eat. After 3500 bce, villages in the wetlands of southern Iraq grew into towns, and towns grew into cities. The techniques used by the Sumerians gradually spread up the rivers and to the outer edges of the valley. After 2000 bce, farmers began watering their fields with a shaduf, or “wellsweep,” a long pole with a bucket at one end and a counterweight at the other. Instead of using a hoe or a digging stick as their ancestors had, they cultivated their fi elds with an ox-drawn plow and planted seeds with a seed drill, a device that dropped seeds at regular intervals. This shift from horticulture to true agriculture produced much greater yields. Under the direction of their rulers, gangs of laborers dug canals up to 75 feet wide and many miles in length. The most famous of their kings, the lawgiver Hammurabi who reigned from 1792 to 1750 bce, named one of his canals “Hammurabi-spells-abundance.”
Egypt was an easy land to farm compared with Mesopotamia. The Nile flooded its valley in late summer and early fall, after the harvest. Unlike the Tigris and Euphrates, the timing of the Nile flood was predictable, and the silt its waters carried was fertile and salt-free. The Egyptians built low dikes that divided the land into basins, letting water stand for about a month to deposit its silt and soak the soil before it was allowed to flow downstream to the delta of the Nile. Crops were planted in October or November and harvested in April or May, before the next flood.
Neolithic peoples had inhabited the Nile Valley for centuries, farming on the riverbanks and hunting and fi shing the wild game in which the land abounded. In the fourth millennium bce, Egypt was divided into little kingdoms, each of which had a “water house” that planned the building of dikes and the soaking of the fi elds. In the early third millennium, after lower and upper Egypt were united under the Pharaoh Menes, engineers installed what we call nilometers, devices that measured the height of the river. The regularity of the floods led them to devise a 365¼-day calendar. When they saw Sirius, the brightest star, rising in the dawn sky in line with the rising sun, they knew the flood was imminent. They also developed surveying instruments and a practical geometry to help them place boundary stones to mark the edges of fields and irrigation basins. They used shadufs and other devices such as pulleys and treadmills to lift water above the level of canals. The resulting food surpluses not only supported the creation of the elaborate culture and awe-inspiring monuments for which ancient Egypt has always been famous, but they also produced the most secure and sustainable civilization the world has ever known—one that lasted, with only brief interruptions, for 3,000 years.
Difficult Farming Conditions and Innovative Solutions for Developing Technologies
