How did floods effect the Tigris and Euphrates people?

Answer 1

Annual flooding could destroy villages and urban center, tear up fields and destroy city walls. Alternately, heavy flooding, especially repeatedly heavy flooding over the course of a few years, might gradually or even quickly change the course of major rivers and tributaries in the Mesopotamian flood plan. However, because the flood plain was situated between two large rivers, the wider and slower Euphrates River to the south and the narrow and faster Tigris River from the north, the water from these two rivers could be channeled and usually contained to maintain lasting irrigation sources throughout the year. Levees/dykes or earthen banks naturally formed along the edges of these rivers and their tributaries over time, but as urban areas became more dependent on these rivers and grew to support a larger population to administer public, large-scale waterworks like the huge systematic canal networks that came to crisscross the lower Tigris-Euphrates flood plain, these earthen banks were built up even higher to contain the heavy water flow during the flood season from late February to May/June. Cities rose up near, but not usually directly on, the major rivers, and semi-democratic councils of elders --wealthy and powerful landowners--organized labor to build major canals connecting the rivers to the city as well as minor irrigation ditches from the canals and urban center to the farmland surrounding the city and growing the agricultural surplus necessary to make religious and administrative leadership possible. If we assume that given average rainfall or irrigation in a moderate growing season, the average family can produce about 110% of what they need to survive annually, then the 10% surplus they make would be distributed among a very few elite who had time to focus on administrative and religious leadership, and later on learning to read and write, to be soldiers throughout the year and not part-time soldiers and part-time famers, and even traders or skilled craftsmen. These diverse roles, even though they constituted less than 80% of the population, were really only possible in cities of a certain size, and cities could only reach that size in Mesopotamia with a gradually expanding network of canals that served for irrigation and trade connections throughout the region. Scholars used to believe that city size grew naturally over time; however scholarship since the late 70s on ancient Sumerian urban site excavations and since the 90s on environmental influences on ancient urbanization suggest that human cities may never have developed; natural supply-and-demand of agricultural surplus did not necessitate urbanization. It has also been suggested recently that urban centers did not necessarily grow and then produce social stratifications (priests and kings). More recent scholarship (90s and 2000s) has leaned toward the idea that cities (urban centers of 10,000-100,000), which first appeared in Mesopotamia, did so for unique reasons. Because the canal systems required so much organization and administrative oversight to maintain, needing annual embankment reinforcement, canal maintenance & desilting, and fairly organized expansion and perhaps even fallowing requirements (letting the land "rest" to recuperate nutrients necessary for fertilization and decrease soil salination from irrigation water soaking into the ground and leaching up mineral salts from deep in the soil that decreased crop yields or even killed the crops altogether), that urban growth and social stratification were necessary for basic urban-rural survival. As cities grew, they pushed out into new lands taking over and in some ways perhaps "colonizing" surrounding villages or smaller urban areas, to find more resources. This lead naturally to competition among city-states (the urban religio-political centers) and produced the need for military technology and organization, including kings as solitary military leaders able to make swifter decisions than previous councils of elders. As some cities grew in political strength, competition demanded that other cities follow suit. Local city-states warred and merged and developed the first warring kingdoms in the Ancient Near East (compare to Egypt at the time whose religio-political centers were small with one exception, and the central urban region served primarily for administration and religious oversight, where Pharaoh was a god in charge of local priests who kept records in order to monitor and maintain a healthy agricultural system). In this sense, flooding effected the people who lived between the Tigris & Euphrates by making life possible, by creating the first cities, and by pushing a new model of community life--urban life with all of its related social stratifications, technology, and trade significance.

Answer 2

Floods along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were both beneficial and destructive for ancient civilizations like the Sumerians and Babylonians. The floods brought fertile soil for agriculture, supporting the development of complex irrigation systems. However, they could also cause widespread damage to crops, infrastructure, and settlements, leading to food shortages and displacement of populations.