Oriental Despotism 175of the population throughout the year, no major problem arises. The inhabitants
of the Nile and Ganges Valleys and of many similar areas did not have to construct
elaborate aqueducts for this purpose.
The irregular flow of rivers or streams or the relatively easy access to fresh and
clear mountain water has stimulated in many hydraulic landscapes the construc-
tion of comprehensive installations for the storage and distribution of drinking
water. In America great aqueducts were built by the hydraulic civilizations of the
Andean zone and Meso-America.^33 The many reservoirs (tanks) of Southern India
frequently serve several uses; but near the large residential centres the providing of
drinking water is usually paramount. In certain areas of the Near East, such as Syria
and Assyria, brilliantly designed aqueducts have satisfied the water needs of many
famous cities, Tyre,^34 Antioch^35 and Nineveh^36 among them. In the Western world
of rainfall agriculture, aqueducts were built primarily by such Mediterranean peoples
as the Greeks and the Romans, who since the dawn of history maintained contact
with – and learned from – the technically advanced countries of Western Asia and
North Africa. No doubt the Greeks and Romans would have been able to solve their
drinking-water problem without inspiration from the outside; but the form of their
answer strongly suggests the influence of Oriental engineering.^37
b. Navigation canals
Among the great agrarian conformations of history, only hydraulic society has
constructed navigation canals of any major size. The seafaring Greeks, making the
Mediterranean their highway, avoided an issue which the ancient city states were
poorly equipped to handle. The not-too-numerous Roman canals were apparently
all dug at a time when the growing Orientalization of the governmental apparatus
stimulated, among other things, a growing interest in all kinds of public works.^38
The rainfall farmers of Medieval Europe, like their counterparts elsewhere,
shunned rather than sought the marshy river lowlands. And their feudal masters
paid little attention to the condition of the watercourses, for which they had no
use. Still less did they feel obliged to construct additional and artificial rivers –
canals. Few if any important canals were built during the Middle Ages,^39 and
medieval trade and transport were seriously handicapped by the state of the navi-
gable rivers.^40
It was in connection with the rise of a governmentally encouraged commercial
and industrial capitalism that the West began to build canals on a conspicuous
scale. The ‘pioneer of the canals of modern Europe’, the French Canal du Midi,
was completed only in the second half of the 17th century, in 1681,^41 that is, little
more than a century before the end of the absolutist regime. And in the classical
country of inland navigation, England,^42 ‘little ... was done in making canals ...
until the middle of the eighteenth century’^43 – that is, until a time well after the
close of England’s absolutist period and immediately prior to the beginning of the
machine age.
As stated above, the members of a hydraulic commonwealth felt quite differ-
ently about the management of natural and artificial watercourses. They approached