Author: Marie Siduri
Date: Feb 20, 2003 - 15:14

Mesopotamian kings and such like to let their work be known. In a brick inscription from Lagash, the pre-Sargonic ensi Enmetena had written:

When Ningirsu ordered his regular offerings in the temple Girnun and determined Enmetena's destiny in the temple Eninnu, and Nanshe looked at him approvingly from Sirara, for Ningirsu Enmetena built the regulator of the Lummagin-du Canal, from 648,000 baked bricks and 1840 standard gur of bitumen.

(The regulator worked as a dam of sorts, keeping the water level of the canal high until it was needed for irrigation.)

Rim-Sin I of Larsa, who ruled some time later, also let is be known how he had a canal dug:

...I fashioned the (canal's) two banks like awe-inspiring mountains. I established abundance at it mouth, and its tail I extended. I made the fresh grass thrive on its banks. I called the canal Tuqmat-Erra, and thus restored the eternal waters of the Tigris and Euphrates.

Just the same, chances are neither Enmetena nor Rim-Sin did any of the actually labor on their projects. At least some of the work and the maintenance on the canals was done using corvee labor--that is, labor used as a tax.

It had been argued in the past that the organization needed to built and maintain the canal system led to the city-state organization of Mesopotamian societies. That has been pretty well discounted more recently, however, because the administration of the work on the canals seems to have been handled by and large by a local administration rather than a centralized one. The term translated as "canal inspector" (Akkadian gugallum; Sumerian gugal or kugal) denotes a person who was responsible for organizing the clearance of silted-up canals and rivers, controlling the number of field outlets to keep the water level at the appropriate level and other such work. Postgate notes that the gugallum was a local or district official. He continues:

Despite the evident importance of his role, this official is only rarely mentioned in administrative texts. Presumably this is because the state, as opposed to the village administration, did not need to interfere with locally based organization of this kind. It is hardly necessary to underline the relevance of this conclusion to theories about the interaction of hydraulic control and the political order.

But there is no doubt that throughout Mesopotamian history, the canal system and agriculture were both closely tied not only to each other but also to the state who defined obligations and privileges among them.