178 Early Agriculture
‘Deep dugouts excavated under the huts, and often leading into underground pas-
sages with outlets at some distance, were used for refuge. Almost every country was
secured with great war trenches, which are everywhere to be seen at the present day
and are often still of great depth.’^58
These instances show what even primitive hydraulic societies could achieve in
the field of defence construction, when they strained their cooperative resources to
the full. Higher hydraulic societies employed and varied the basic principle in
accordance with technical and institutional circumstances.
In pre-Columbian Mexico the absence of suitable labour animals placed a
limitation on transport, and while this restricted siege craft, it did not preclude the
struggle for or the defence of the cities. In emergencies many government-built
hydraulic works in the main lake area fulfilled military functions, just as the mon-
ster palaces and temples served as bastions against an invading enemy.^59 Recent
research draws attention to various types of Mexican forts and defence walls.^60
Because of their size and importance, they may safely be adjudged as state-directed
enterprises. The colossal fortresses and walls of pre-Spanish Peru, which astonished
early and recent observers,^61 are known to have been built at the order of the gov-
ernment and by ‘incredibly’ large teams of corvée labourers.^62
Many texts and pictorial representations have portrayed the walls, gates and
towers of ancient Egypt, Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria and Syria. The Arthashāstra
indicates the systematic manner in which the rulers of the first great Indian empire
treated problems of fortification and defence.^63 At the dawn of Chinese history
new capitals were created at the ruler’s command, and during the last centuries of
the Chou period the territorial states used their corviable manpower to wall entire
frontier regions, not only against the tribal barbarians but also against each other.
In the 3rd century BC the unifier of China, Ch’in Shih Huang-ti, linked together
and elaborated older territorial structures to form the longest unbroken defence
installation ever made by man.^64 The periodic reconstruction of the Chinese Great
Wall expresses the continued effectiveness of hydraulic economy and government-
directed mass labour.
b. Roads
The existence of government-made highways is suggested for the Babylonian
period;^65 it is documented for Assyria.^66 And the relationship between these early
constructions and the roads of Persia, the Hellenistic states and Rome seems
‘beyond doubt’.^67 The great Persian ‘royal road’ deeply impressed the contempo-
rary Greeks;^68 it served as a model for the Hellenistic rulers,^69 whose efforts in turn
inspired the official road builders of the Roman empire.^70 According to Mez, the
Arabs inherited ‘the type of “governmental road”, like its name, from the Persian
“Royal Road”.’^71 Beyond this, however, they showed little interest in maintaining
good roads, probably because they continued to rely in the main on camel caravans
for purposes of transport. The later Muslim regimes of the Near East used high-
ways, but they never restored them to the state of technical perfection which char-
acterized the pre-Arab period.^72