The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— Frederick Mario Fales —
levels and by a diminution of urbanism, with a corresponding increase of economic
and social ruralization. Another feature that characterizes this phase is that of extensive
abandonment of settlements in both surveyed areas, with limited compensation in
the foundation of new sites; but it is difficult to state whether, and to what extent,
this trend should be viewed in connection with the shifting away and drying up of
specific watercourses – which, in its turn, according to some, represented the outcome
of a perceptible climatic change towards aridity (Neumann and Parpola 1987) – or
rather due to social and political disruptions for internal/external causes. In any case,
a large part of the surveyed area (and especially the Nippur-Uruk hinterland) is known
from the texts to have been inhabited by partially mobile Aramean groups, essentially
devoted to pastoral activities; and the low level of urbanization of these peoples may
be partly responsible for the scarce traces of settlements detectable through extensive
regional survey techniques.
In general, while the named surveys have provided a reasonably valid and detailed
picture of human occupation for the specifically observed areas, they cannot claim to
be fully representative for the entire southern Mesopotamian environment, in its
extraordinary ecological intricacy. And it is thus not surprising to note that other –
even not particularly distant – areas in the alluvium seem to have enjoyed quite
different living conditions from the ones described above, in relation to their closeness
to the main – and active – watercourses or secondary channels thereof: e.g. Sennacherib’s
claim (cf. below) of widespread destructions of walled cities belonging to the Chaldeans
points clearly to a solid economic prosperity in these tribal enclaves around 700 BC.
For greater precision on this count, however, it would be necessary to have an indepth
reconstruction of the hydrological status of the main sectors of the alluvium
at hand; unfortunately, such a reconstruction is at present still in progress, and is
marked by particular complexities, arising from the need to reconcile the status of
the watercourses as observable from archaeology with their many alternative denominations
to be found in the ancient texts.
In any case, it has at present been convincingly shown that, in the early part of
the first millennium, some changes had affected a previously attested bifurcation of
the Euphrates north of Sippar, with a western branch (the Arah ˘ tu/Purattu) proceeding
southwards to Babylon, and the other (main branch) turning to the south-east in the
direction of the Tigris; only the former still remained viable as a waterway, while
the latter had dried out and required artificial rejuvenation in the seventh century as
the ‘King’s Channel’. Also, the easternly Kutha and Kish branches of the Arah ˘ tu/
Purattu were now dry, and the two areas in the alluvium had to be fed by man-made
canals (Cole and Gasche 2000). Finally, Pallukkatu – a name deriving from Abgal/
Apkallatu, that of an inner branch of the Arah ˘ tu/Purattu since the third millennium
– was now the designation of a westernmost arm of the river, possibly also of artificial
origin, which should have branched out from present-day Fallujah (as the correspondence
in names through time might show), and thereupon flowing on the desert
terrace to the west of Babylon and through Borsippa before rejoining the Arah ˘ tu.
In a nutshell, all the main branchings of the ‘Euphrates’ had shifted westward, and
an abundance of water characterized the entire western sector of the alluvium from
the eighth to the seventh centuries BC onward, with Borsippa finding itself progressively
surrounded by marshes and crossed by a ‘swollen’ river, as a Neo-Assyrian letter states
(Fales 1995: 209); whereas the eastern cities, such as Nippur, were plagued by a
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