22 March - World Water Day 2006: Water and Culture

Mills in the Kinderdijk-Elshout area, Netherlands © UNESCO

In addition to offering a route on which to transport products, people and cultural values, such as language and traditions, water also provides the primary element of technological development. It is the first recorded source of energy, produced through the use of watermills as early as the first century BC in the Roman Empire. The use of such technology spread quickly and was also recorded as far away as in China some forty years later.

The first water-powered and water-related technologies focused on ways to make life easier and livelihood production more efficient. Like most rivers, the Nile was subject to rises and falls according to the climate and geographical terrain across which it flowed. To counter the effects of excessive water variability which could negatively affect agricultural and development, the Egyptians practised a form of water management called basin irrigation, a productive adaptation of the natural flood cycle of the river. They constructed a network of earthen banks, some parallel to the river and some perpendicular to it, that formed basins of various sizes. Regulated sluices would direct floodwater into a basin, where it would sit for a month or so until the soil was saturated. Then the remaining water would be drained off to a basin or a nearby canal, and the farmers of the drained plot would plant their crops.

Even earlier than basin irrigation structures came the Persian qanats. These elaborate tunnel systems, begun in the first millennium BC, were used to extract groundwater in the dry mountain basins of present-day Iran. All along the qanat, which could be several kilometres long, vertical shafts were sunk at intervals of 20 to 30 metres to remove excavated material and provide ventilation and access for repairs. The main qanat tunnel descended all the way from the mountains to the villages. From there, canals would distribute water to fields for irrigation, allowing farmers to successfully cultivate their land, despite long periods of drought. Many qanats are still in use today, stretching from China to Morocco, and even to the Americas.

These examples of technological development for water management, and their subsequent spread across continents, and eventually the globe, show the incredible force of water to provide life, economic well-being and a means for change and exchange. These developments were made through water and carried by water to near and distant cities, where they were then adopted and adapted and carried forward to ever more distant lands. As such, water is, and has always been, both a source and a vehicle for cultural change and exchange.