Through the mid-twentieth century, it was embedded in an outlook that viewed the
birth of Mesopotamian civilization as inherently tied to the drying of primordial lands,
accompanied by state (or temple, or household) administration of irrigation systems
and plow agriculture. In Iraq, in the closing decade of the twentieth century, that belief
played a major part in the destruction of nearly 20 , 000 km^2 of wetlands that for
centuries prior had directly sustained between a quarter- and half-million people (and
indirectly many times that number) – in exchange for a few poor years of agricultural
output, now abandoned (IMOS 2006 ; Chen et al. 2010 ; Garstecki and Amr 2011 )
(Figure 1. 7 b and c).
However, as we see in this brief review, we cannot extrapolate the origins of
Sumerian urban centers from an irrigated version of the modern desert landscape.
Marshy deposits underlay or surrounded the earliest occupation layers of all early urban
sites. Those cities are better imagined as islands embedded in a marshy plain, situated
on the borders and in the heart of vast deltaic marshlands (Figure 1. 5 ). Their waterways
served less as irrigation canals than as transport routes. The essential nature of those
wetlands in supporting and shaping the complex social institutions that underlay
urbanization in southern Mesopotamia is evident from the earliest protoliterate
accounts. For example, the predominance of reeds, reed bundles, and reed structures
–– Jennifer R. Pournelle ––GULFMARSHESMARSH REMNANTSFigure 1.7The Mesopotamian Delta.
(a) Ur III. (b) 1972. (c) 2010.