Sennacherib Industrial Canal

Metawh1

10 Aug, 2024

The era of the Assyrians was distinguished by many projects that they established throughout their country, and the field of irrigation was the most prominent field in this regard, and one of the most important irrigation projects was the Sennacherib Industrial Canal.

The aqueduct contains similar notations, with Sennacherib essentially signing his name to the achievement like a painter would sign his canvas, besides the not so humble descriptor, "the king of the world, the king of the land of Assyria."

Sennacherib's rule

He ascended the throne after the death of his father, Sargon II. As his name indicates, he was not Sargon's eldest son, but he was chosen as crown prince and military governor of the troubled northern border region.

His courage in difficult situations, and his firmness in carrying out justice, supported his position. As soon as his father was assassinated in 705 BC. He hastened to seize the throne before the dissidents marched on him.

Sennacherib's most important architectural works

Sennacherib ruled for twenty-three years (681 - 704 BC), and he was famous for his great activity in the field of construction, reconstruction, and agricultural irrigation projects in Assyria.

The first thing we mention of his urban works is that he made Nineveh the main capital of the empire, and for this reason he directed the largest part of his urban activity to renovating, beautifying, expanding and fortifying its buildings.

He decorated it by erecting new temples and palaces and planting fantastic gardens, and made it a capital worthy of the vast empire into which the Assyrian kingdom developed.

On the one hand, it expanded from a city with a circumference not exceeding two miles to a city with a circumference of about eight miles, and it included two new sections allocated by King Sennacherib for palaces and temples, and they are the two places now known as “Quinjaq” Hill, which is the northern section of the city, and the Prophet Yunus Hill, on the other side. From the city to the right of the modern road from Mosul to Baghdad.

The aqueduct

The Sennacherib Industrial Canal was a major engineering project commissioned by the Assyrian king Sennacherib . It was constructed to bring water from the Aqueduct of Jerwan to the city of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire at the time.

Location

: This canal is located north of Nineveh in Assyria In the Bastourah area, northeast of the city of Erbil, near the village of Qalamurtaka, and it ran for about 50 km, from the Aqueduct of Jerwan on the Gomel River to Nineveh on the Tigris River.

It serves as a testimony to the engineering prowess of the Assyrian king Sennacherib, who supervised its construction.

Purpose

Sennacherib recorded the reasons and purposes for digging the canal on a tablet in cuneiform script, that is, just like what happens now when the foundation stone for projects is laid, as a questionnaire for the adopting party and information about the merits of the project.

He wrote on the foundation tablet of the project the following: “I, Sennacherib, king of Assyria and the world, dug three rivers from the mountains of Khani, the mountains that are located on the heights of the city, and I pumped spring water from the right and left sides to the three rivers. After that, I drew water on It forms a straight channel to the center of the city of the great god Ishtar and the homeland of the virtuous lady”.
This impressive wall, decorated with Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions, preserves the heritage of the world's oldest aqueduct, the Sennacherib Aqueduct.

It is apparent that the canals were part of a grand plane to remake the demography of Assyria: a new capital was constructed and populated, and labor was imported and agricultural infrastructure was created to supply water to the growing city of Nineveh and support its industrial and agricultural activities.

. Not all of the water went to mundane agriculture; but Sennacherib's inscriptions also describe elaborate parks and gardens designed to emulate the wetter landscapes of Anatolia and Babylonia, which were surely fed by his canal network.

Construction

It was an impressive engineering feat, with the canal cut through solid rock in some places and crossing deep valleys using aqueducts.

The canal was built to divert water from the Khanis Strait, 50 km north of Nineveh.

Regarding this canal, 19th and early 20th-century publications on this project present the work of early explorers and archaeologists whose target was to discover and document what was preserved in the landscape, with an emphasis on rock reliefs and inscriptions, while later work adopted and goes on to adopt more technologically advanced methodologies and approaches with the aim to recover as well as conserve the full extent of these canal systems and to explore their influence on the rural and urban landscapes of the Assyrian heartland.

Sennacherib built a dam on the course of the Al-Khawsar River, one of the ancient tributaries of the Tigris River. A delegation that knew this river by the same current name, and transformed its waters into a canal that was taken from in front of the dam and ran parallel to the river to the west until it ended in the fields of Nineveh. Sennacherib expanded the springs from which Al-Khawsar springs into North of Nineveh and conducted it to Al-Khawsar with special canals and from there to a new canal.

However, this project was no longer sufficient to irrigate the vast fields that he revived in northern Nineveh, so he turned to the Kumal tributary in the eastern side of Al-Khazur, which is the tributary that passes near Atrush and flows into the Khazir River. He brought water from the springs of this tributary in Mount Bafian and channeled it in canals to the kommel.

Then he built a dam on this tributary in the Bafian Strait to reserve water and store it in front of the dam. He created a river in front of the dam that branches off from the western side of the dam. It is located at a point near the present-day village of Khans and ends in Al-Khusar and then Nineveh, a distance of more than fifty miles.

The deep valleys that obstruct the course of this river on its way to Al-Khawsar were connected by arches of white stones and the stream ran over them. The largest of these arches is the one located near Jarwana, where its huge monuments are clearly visible. It is considered one of the greatest monuments in this country, and is known now. Archaeologists have found the phrase Jarwana, and the features of this project are still evident in Hadad from the villages through which the canal passes, such as the village of Shivshirin, Kendala, Muqbil, Mahmoudan, and Jaffna.

Capacity

This project is considered the most important and largest ancient irrigation project that was established by ancient people in northern Iraq in ancient times. It is certainly one of the great projects in which art and creativity are most clearly demonstrated, which indicates the progress of the various arts, especially in irrigation affairs. It was the main motivation that led Sennacherib to The completion of this project is to deliver water in a touristic way to its capital, Nineveh, whose ruins can still be seen on the left side of the Tigris River opposite the current city of Mosul.

This canal could supply an estimated 200,000 cubic meters of water per day to Nineveh.