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Erum Sattar recently posted "From the Moors to the New World: Lessons from Dynamic Water Sharing for a Colonial-Era System in the Indus" . The abstract: This project is a close study of the legal and political aspects of management of water resources in semi-arid environments. The British in India laid the foundations of the modern irrigation system in what is now India and Pakistan. In semi-arid environments, the bulk of agriculture relies on irrigation, as it did in Spain under the Moors. We can observe a stark divide in the use of laws and institutions to manage natural resources in different societies, at different times and places. Some societies have managed in a way that achieved prosperity and long-term sustainability. Others have mismanaged so as to create ecological devastation and social stagnation. The Moors of Spain created a vibrant civilization in the Middle Ages that lasted nearly eight hundred years. One of the reasons for the dynamism of their civilization w...

Figure 1:  Memorial cone of the Mesilim Treaty Thanks to Peter Sand for contributing this post! [Footnotes after the jump.] The Musée du Louvre in Paris holds tangible evidence of the world’s first known legal agreement on boundary water resources: viz., the Mesilim Treaty , concluded in the 25th century B.C. between the two Mesopotamian states of Lagash and Umma . The terms of the treaty have been preserved as cuneiform inscriptions on a limestone cone (figure 1) and a stele commemorating Lagash’s victorious battle enforcing the treaty.[1] Fragments of both artifacts were excavated in 1878-1912 by French archeologists on sites at Tellō ( Tall Lawh, Dhi Qar Governate in Southern Iraq), the ancient temple-city of Girsu, once the capital of Lagash.[2] The inscriptions, transcribed and translated into French, German, Italian and English,[3] turned out to match several other texts on corresponding archeological finds of the period. The key exhibit, the so-called ‘Stele of the Vultures’, d...

Last August's Environment and History  had an article by Michele Campopiano, "Cooperation and Private Enterprise in Water Management in Iraq: Continuity and Change between the Sasanian and Early Islamic Periods (Sixth to Tenth Centuries) ". The article has a lot on the property system of the Sasanians and its relationship to water management. The abstract: This article shows that the management of water resources in Late Sasanian and Early Islamic Iraq (sixth to tenth centuries ad) implied the participation of local communities and the mutual cooperation of landholders. The organisation of water management in the Late Sasanian Period (sixth to seventh centuries) depended on a highly complex system of interaction between local communities, aristocratic rulers and the imperial bureaucracy. This interaction allowed the government to gather information from different regions of the empire and to understand the needs of the different stakeholders. As such, the system provided ...

At the end of  the previous post in this series  I argued that the history of environmental law remains in need of extensive work both in uncovering the legal roots of contemporary environmental law and in making the lateral connections between historical environmental law and other historical topics. I would like to suggest that of these two dimensions—we might think of them as longitudinal and lateral—the first order of business should be longitudinal, deepening the temporal dimension of environmental law. We will be hard pressed to assess the significance of historical environmental law or its interactions with other areas of law and life without knowing what it was or what people thought about it. However, given that 'environmental law' is a recently coined term, where are we to look for historical environmental law? I will offer several directions of inquiry, some of them already explored by environmental and other historians, though often without the sensitivity to...

Gonzalo Rodriguez recently posted "Protecting Inland Waterways: From the Institutes of Gaius to Magna Carta" . The abstract: No single factor has had a more significant effect on the ebbs and flows of history than water. Water creates civilizations, and water brings them to extinction. Even today, thousands of years after we learned to harness the power of water, we continue to struggle in determining how to prioritize competing uses of water resources, how to make water available to all who need it, and how to protect it. Yet, these are questions that humans have faced since as long as history dares to recollect. What factors guide civilizations in their decision whether, and to what extent, to regulate and protect inland waterways? This article looks at four legal codes from three distinct civilizations: From the Romans, The Institutes of Gaius and the Corpus Juris Civilis; from the Visigoth Kingdom, the Visigothic Code; and from the English, Magna Carta. This article propo...