Water_ The Epic Struggle For Wealth, Power, And Civilization Part 4

3.

Lifting, damming, and channeling water has often made the difference between agricultural surplus and famine. Water-lifting irrigation devices, such as the workhorse Middle Eastern noria or chain of pots (1) and Archimedes' screw (2), have remained in continuous use since antiquity. Handbuilt, water-storage earthen dams, like the one being reinforced by rural Kenyan villagers in 2004 (3), were mainstays of Egyptian and Mesopotamian hydraulic civilizations five millennia ago.

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4.

Wet rice farming requires intensive and sophisticated water management. Nineteenth-century Chinese farmers sow rice and move water on wooden treadle pumps according to traditional methods.

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5.

A highland Ethiopian farmer in 2008 plows his field in a manner virtually unchanged since the start of civilization.

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6.

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7.

Two notable vessels of the seafaring Mediterranean world were the ancient Greek's nimble warship circa 480 BC, the trireme (6), with its deadly pointed ram at the bow, and the lumbering Roman cargo ship circa AD 200 (7) that transported goods from the far reaches of the empire to feed the enormous imperial capital.

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8.

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9.

Marcus Agrippa (8), Augustus' lifelong right-hand man, transformed the empire's health, military robustness, and civic society by inst.i.tutionalizing the public supply of abundant, clean water through extensive aqueducts, such as the remnant at the Pont du Gard in southern France (9), to urban fountains, baths, and functioning sewers.

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10.

Li Bing built sophisticated waterworks, like the still-functioning Min River diversion weirs in Sichuan, that spread prosperity and helped the Ch'in dynasty consolidate power throughout China in the third century BC.

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11.

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12.

The completion of the 1,100 mile Grand Ca.n.a.l (11) in the seventh century AD united the resources of the south's Yangtze and the north's Yellow River and catalyzed China's spectacularly advanced medieval civilization. The New Grand Ca.n.a.l in the early fifteenth century signaled the nation's fateful turn inward and voluntary withdrawal of its indomitable fleets from the high seas. A traditional seagoing Chinese junk (12).

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13.

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14.

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15.

Islam's glorious age, from the eighth to twelfth centuries, was built upon a vast trading network of desert-crossing camel caravans (13) and lateen sail-rigged, cargo-carrying dhows (14), which spanned from Atlantic Spain across the Indian Ocean and south along Africa's coasts and interior river civilizations. Yet Islam's arid homeland's shortage of small rivers limited its use of waterwheels for power and irrigation, like the one functioning on the Orontes River at Hama, Syria (15), in the early twentieth century, and contributed to its rapid decline from world prominence after the twelfth century.

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