Watch Site of the Week: The Assyrian king Sennacherib built a great network of main and secondary canals, earthworks, weirs, dams, sluices, and aqueducts in the foothills north of Nineveh to regulate the waters of the mountain streams and rivers of the piedmont region, to supply with water Nineveh’s hinterland, and to prevent recurrent flooding of the urban area of the capital and its royal parks and fields. The “Canal of Sennacherib” was part of this impressive hydraulic system and originated from the Gomel River at Khinnis. The canal system, built around 690 B.C., was the last stage of Sennacherib’s irrigation program. The waters of the Gomel were diverted into a tributary of the River Khosr by means of a 35-km-long canal. Several wadis were bridged by the construction of stone aqueducts that carried Sennacherib’s canal. One of these is the famous Jerwan aqueduct excavated in the 1930s by The Oriental Institute of Chicago. Four other massive aqueducts have been recently identified during a field survey. Through this impressive system of primary and secondary canals and aqueducts the Assyrian king made the foothill plains to the north of Nineveh into the granary of Assyria, transforming the region into an intensive, high-productivity agricultural area based on artificial irrigation—and not only on extensive, but less productive, dry-farming.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 16:15:00 +0000
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