The Lords of Canals: Re-Examining the Sasanian Hydraulic Landscapes and Their Heritage in the Islamic Period
The Lords of Canals: Re-Examining the Sasanian Hydraulic Landscapes and Their Heritage in the Islamic Period
Sasanian kings are known as builders of impressive hydraulic projects such as the monumental canal of Nahrawan (in southern Iraq), and the Shadorwan bridge of Shushtar (in southwestern Iran). Sasanian hydraulic landscapes have had a profound impact on anthropological discourse of empires and water management, as they linked large and complex water infrastructures to a highly centralized state system. The evidence for state engineering is found in the linearity of Sasanian canals and the monumentality of their bridges and weirs. It is commonly believed that the monumental Sasanian waterworks fell into decline in the sixth and sevenths centuries because of the decline of the state power and its eventual demise in the wake of the Islamic conquest. This talk will shed fresh light on water management in the Sasanian period. First, it stresses the longue durée of the Sasanian hydraulic infrastructures by showing the connection of these waterworks to prior investments and the evidence for continuous investment in Sasanian hydraulic landscapes in the Islamic period . Second, it will question the degree and the scale of centralized water management in the Sasanian period.
About the Speaker
Mehrnoush Soroush is an archaeologist and historian of ancient water infrastructures. She holds a Ph.D. from the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University, and is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. Her research integrates digital technologies, fieldwork, and textual sources in order to investigate the history and intersection of water management and urbanism in the Iranian World. She is primarily interested in examining how water technologies enabled the formation and maintenance of a burgeoning network of Iranian cities in arid and semi-arid regions that relied on market-oriented irrigation agriculture and water intensive industries.
Citation
Soroush, Mehrnoush. "The Lords of Canals: Re-Examining the Sasanian Hydraulic Landscapes and Their Heritage in the Islamic Period," Pourdavoud Center Lecture Series. May 9, 2019
About the Speaker
Mehrnoush Soroush
University of Chicago
Mehrnoush Soroush is a landscape archaeologist who examines the intersection between urban and water history in the Ancient Near East. She got her Ph.D. from New York University and her MA in Architecture from the University of Tehran, Iran. Her research explores the extent to which the resilience of ancient cities was tied to their ability to adapt to environmental changes and socio-political developments through adopting new hydraulic strategies and technologies. She is particularly interested in examining the water history of the Parthian, Sasanian, and Islamic periods, the periods that often fall on the margins or outside the scope of traditional Near Eastern archaeological research. Her interdisciplinary approach draws on all available data, including archaeological fieldwork, textual and archival research, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing, and computational methods. Previously, she (re)-examined the history of canal irrigation in the Sasanian and early Islamic periods in southwestern Iran. As the Assistant Director of the Harvard-led Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey, she is now investigating the water history in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, in particular the timing and cause(s) of the shift of historically dry-farmed plain to one irrigated by subterranean qanat systems (locally known as karez) that dominated the landscape in the later medieval periods.