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Drone photos reveal an early Mesopotamian city made of marsh islands
- jk_ra_el 4y agoVivec City (Morrowind / Elder Scrolls Online) vindicated. Ancient Mesopotamia is so fascinating. Isn’t it?
- wanderingstan 4y agoIf you’re interested in the history of Lagash and the wider Sumerian civilization, I highly recommend the _Fall of Civilizations Podcast_ episode 8. https://youtu.be/d2lJUOv0hLA https://youtu.be/d2lJUOv0hLA At 2.5 hours it’s more like an audiobook. During the pandemic this was my gateway into learning a ton about this ancient civilization, when humanity first began to write and thus be able to communicate with us thousands of years later.
- rjtavares 4y agoAlso highly recommended from the same podcast: the episode on the Han Dynasty. Chinese history is such a fascinating and underexplored topic in "the West", most of what's in that episode was new to me.
- lbhdc 4y agoI second that recommendation. Fall of civilization is really well done, their Petra episode is another good one.
- koheripbal 4y ago... and all of this is possible because Turkey took advantage of the disarray in Iraq and Syria over the last 20 years and built large dams and aqueducts on the upper Tigris and Euphrates rivers, drastically reducing their flows and causing water levels in Southern Iraqi marsh lands to almost entirely dry up. It's a humanitarian catastrophe. Not to say that we should not use this opportunity to do critical archeology. In fact, this situation may not last, so we should invest in digs asap. ...but it is still important to understand the nature of why these sites are being discovered now.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoDams don't 'dry up' rivers - they control them. The lake created doesn't have infinite capacity. Once filled, the flow downstream resumes normal levels. Just doesn't have floods like it used to.
- readthenotes1 4y agoWhere I live, we then drain those lakes regularly for the water of our cities so the water available down stream is greatly reduced except in tons of flood in which case it is unusually high.
- hinkley 4y agoThe Mediterranean would dry up if the Straits of Gibraltar closed up. That’s some very large fraction of all rivers in Europe plus the biggest in Africa that never actually make it to the Atlantic. Evaporation is the cause.
- rhodorhoades 4y agoThis is untrue. You aren’t thinking about the effects of sediment, usage, and erosion. When you build a dam and allow the riverbeds to dry, it changes the entire water table of the region.
- lostlogin 4y agoIt also blocks animal migration.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoThey don't dry; they resume as normal once the dam is complete. I don't understand that nobody can see this. The lake can't hold all the water to inifinity. Once it's full, the outflow becomes normal. Except now you can regulate it.
- BurningFrog 4y agoThe marshes were drained by Saddam to punish the local population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draining_of_the_Mesopotamian_Marshes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draining_of_the_Mesopotamian_M...
- akamaka 4y agoDo we fully understand why prehistoric human wanted to live on these watery sites? I find it so hard to understand, since living on dry land and avoiding marshes is a strongly ingrained idea now. But there are so many archeologic sites like this, is must have had a strong appeal. For example, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Must_Farm_Bronze_Age_settlement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Must_Farm_Bronze_Age_settlem...
- pge 4y agoAccess to food sources, maybe? Compared to most terrestrial game, fish are easier to catch and provide a plentiful source of protein.
- malcolmwhite 4y agoThe Uros people moved from land to fabricated islands on Lake Titicaca to escape Incan conquest. The Aztecs created islands to have more productive farmland. Likewise the Incas when creating Cusco in a marshy valley.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoEvery American midwest town is on a river. Because the pioneers needed water, every day. Carrying water is a huge chore.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoIt is not only a huge chore, but you can only go a short distance from water before the time to transport is uses every productive hour of labor. No time to grow food or make things.
- bioemerl 4y agoWe still need water, and living on the river is still the most sustainable source of it, plus the incredible amounts of transportation you can do inland with rivers out matches roads by a thousand times. I would never not live on a river. The ocean is cool and all, but it's full of salt and you can't drink that.
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- ultra_nick 4y agoAtlantis?
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- anm89 4y agoThey really couldn't come up with a better name for that than "remote sensing"?
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- Ancapistani 4y agoThat term has been used as far back as the 60s, based on my personal library.
- dredmorbius 4y agoSlightly earlier, though yes, it largely came into vogue with the emergence of satellite reconnaissance and observations. Google Ngram Viewer: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=remote+sensing&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cremote%20sensing%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cremote%20sensing%3B%2Cc0A https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=remote+sensing...>
- anm89 4y agoFair, I've always heard the term in reference to psychics.