“Construction of tidal irrigation systems helped to drive the formation of city states some 5,000 years ago.
Shifting tides along the coast of the ancient region called Mesopotamia might have spurred the rise of the world’s oldest civilization1.
Urban settlements appeared on the Mesopotamian plain — which is now mostly in modern-day Iraq — more than 5,000 years ago, fed by the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Archaeologists have worked to understand how large-scale irrigation might have helped this complex society to develop.
Liviu Giosan at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and Reed Goodman at Clemson University in South Carolina studied a sediment core drilled from the site of the ancient city of Lagash, upstream of where the Tigris and Euphrates join and flow into the Persian Gulf. This helped the scientists to compile a history of how the rivers meandered across the plain and deposited sediment.
The changes in sediment build-up altered tidal patterns along the coast, affecting how much water was available through the year for farming. People probably joined together to build tidal irrigation systems, and worked together even more closely later to convert those to river irrigation systems. Those collaborations gave rise to urbanized clusters.” [1]
1. Nature 645, 287 (2025)
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