Control of water as factor in early civilizations of arid lands.
The history of Egypt shows a similar effect of the yearly inundation of the Nile Valley. Here, as in all rainless countries where irrigation must be practiced, the water becomes a potent factor of political union and civilization. Its scarcity necessitates common effort in the construction and maintenance of irrigation works, and a central control to secure fair distribution of the water to the fields of the inhabitants. A stimulus to progress is found in the presence of a problem, perennial as the yearly threatenings of the Hoangho, which demands the application of human intelligence and concerted labor for its solution. Additional arable land for the growing population can be secured only by the wider distribution of the fructifying water; this in turn depends upon corporate effort wisely directed and ably controlled. Every lapse in governmental efficiency means an encroachment of the desert upon the alluvial fields and finally to the river bank, as to-day in Mesopotamia.
The fact that the earliest civilizations have originated in the sub-tropical rainless districts of the world has been ascribed solely to the regular and abundant returns to tillage under irrigation, as opposed to the uncertain crops under variable meteorological conditions; to the consequent accumulation of wealth, and the emancipation of man for other and higher activities, which follows his escape from the agricultural vicissitudes of an uncertain climate. When Draper says: "Civilization depends on climate and agriculture," and "the civilization of Egypt depended for its commencement on the sameness and stability of the African climate," and again, "agriculture is certain in Egypt and there man first became civilized,"[614] he seizes upon the conspicuous fact of a stable food supply as the basis of progress, failing to detect those potent underlying social effects of the inundations—social and political union to secure the most effective distribution of the Nile's blessings and to augment by human devices the area accessible to them, the development of an intelligent water economy, which ultimately produced a long series of intellectual achievements.[615]
Cultural areas in primitive America.
This unifying and stimulating national task of utilizing and controlling the water was the same task which in various forms prompted the early civilization of the Hoangho and Yangtze basins, India, Mesopotamia, Persia, Peru, Mexico, and that impressive region of prehistoric irrigation canals found in the Salt, Gila River, and upper Rio Grande valleys.[616] Here the arid plateaus of the Cordilleras between the Pueblo district and Central America had no forests in which game might be found; so that the Indian hunter had to turn to agriculture and a sedentary life beside his narrow irrigated fields. Here native civilization reached its highest grade in North America. Here desert agriculture achieved something more than a reliable food supply. It laid the foundation of the first steady integration of wandering Indian hordes into a stable, permanently organized society. Elsewhere throughout the North American continent, we see only shifting groups of hunter and fisher folk, practising here and there a half nomadic agriculture to supplement the chase.
The primitive American civilization that arose among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, the only strictly sedentary tribes relying exclusively on agriculture north of the Mexican plateau, was primarily a result of the pressure put upon these people by a restricted water supply.[617] Though chiefly offshoots of the wild Indians of the northern plains, they have been markedly differentiated from their wandering Shoshone and Kiowa kindred by local environment.[618] Scarcity of water in those arid highlands and paucity of arable land forced them to a carefully organized community life, made them invest their labor in irrigation ditches, terraced gardens and walled orchards, whereby they were as firmly rooted in their scant but fertile fields as were their cotton plants and melon vines;[619] while the towering mesas protected their homes against marauding Ute, Navajo and Apache.[620] This thread of a deep underlying connection between civilization and the control of water can be traced through all prehistoric America, as well as through the earliest cultural achievements in North Africa and Asia.
Economy of the water: fisheries.