Journal of Earth Sciences and Geotechnical Engineering

History of Irrigation and Agriculture In The Land of the Two Rivers

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• Prelude

  Writing history is not an easy or simple task. Even historians normally approach it with caution and care to put the events in the correct perspective in time and setting. Trying to read history of a particular historical event and drawing the right conclusions is, however, an even more difficult work. Different motives may lay behind writing the history of a particular event which necessitates looking into it from different angles and trying to reach an unbiased conclusion. When I decided to write on the history of “Irrigation and Agriculture of the Land between the two Rivers” as an engineer, I thought that the problems involved are insurmountable, and maybe I should leave it to others. The challenge was very strong, and finally I decided to take it. The real problem was not in the absence of references, but on the contrary, there were so many of them that they needed to be scrutinized carefully. Archeologists who had dug in hundreds of sites in Iraq were so many, and their writings were so bulky for their work spanned well over hundred and fifty years. Many historians have also produced thousands of pages on the subject. In selecting resources, much weight had to be placed on primary older references whenever available. In all cases, I have listed the websites in which these resources are found; which is in conformity with the present-day intensive use of the internet to allow readers and researchers to refer back to these original sources for more details.