Perhaps the essential ingredient to any viable civilisation is access to water. Nearly all the great civilisations the world grew up around water, which provided the key not only to supplying freshwater, but also to agriculture, trade, transport and defence. Such civilisations as the Roman Empire, Egyptian Civilisation, the Venetian Empire and the Omayyad Dynasty were all founded on their access to water, which provided their population with the means to both survive and expand.
History provides copious evidence of the influence of water on the growth of civilisation, and forecasts for the future suggest that water will become even more important to human advancement in the third millennium. In both the past and present human progress has been conditional on advances in water science and their application through engineering and technology for the benefit of society. It can also be argued that their unfettered applications have brought about many of the problems we face today. Which ever view is taken, can it be said that scientific advances involving water have been central to progress and remain so—the water wheel, steam power, linking polluted water and disease, the centrifugal pump, filter beds for water treatment and so on. Each step forward in water science has had an impact on the use of water and subsequently on the economy, society, settlement, law, the environment and other areas of endeavour.
Water and Civilisation
Rome: Water and the City
The art of the bath and its social importance were so great in ancient Rome that, by the end of the Republic (first century B.C.), supplying water and building bath facilities had become major questions in the life of the city. The construction of spectacular public baths, by successive Roman emperors, was a way of impressing citizens with the power and prestige of their rulers. The best-known Roman baths were built under Diocletian and Caracalla. Water was used extensively as a structural element in architectural designs other than public baths, such as walkways, terraces, gardens and, occasionally, shops and libraries. Wastewater was carried away in a series of sewer drains emptying into the Cloaca maxima, a former stream in ancient times that had been transformed into a drainage channel, probably during the sixth century B.C.
Place: Bath, England
The amount of water distributed in ancient Rome has been estimated at about one million m3 (over 250 million gallons) per day. Supplied to the center of the cities by aqueducts, the water flowed out into the numerous public fountains where collecting basins had been built. These fountains were the source of water for the whole city, for drinking, hygiene, putting out fires, or just for the enjoyment and pleasure of the citizens.
The first Roman aqueduct was built in 312 B.C. under the censor (Roman public official) Appius Claudius Caecus. Three more were built during the Republic in order to distribute water to the center of the city. Connecting cities to water supplies was a characteristic trait of the entire Roman Empire. Some of the remains of Rome's mastery over water may still be seen today in the aqueducts near Segovia and Tarragona in Spain, at Istanbul and Antioch in Turkey, and Catania in Sicily, and in the Pont du Gard in the south of France.
Place: The Pont du Gard, France
Water was essential to the survival of the city of Rome. When the Goths swept down through Italy in the 5th century, one of the first things they did to break down the defences of Rome was to destroy its water supply. This lack of water continued to prevent Rome from recovering its former glory until the Renaissance, when new architects managed to restore the water supplies to Rome, allowing the city to be repopulated and expand once more.
Venice: the city of water
Venice’s history is entwined with the sea due to its peculiar situation, perched on approximately 120 small islands, within a lagoon formed by the River Po. From its beginnings as a refuge for the Bishop of Ravenna from the barbarian invaders, water has been crucial to the cities survival, and later became the source of the cities economic growth and wealth. After the ninth century, the city developed as a port, becoming the most important center for Levantine goods to enter Europe. A whole lagoon-oriented way of life was established in Venice, even though from the beginning the city had to deal with the mud and rising waters. And even though water is what makes Venice so attractive to tourists today, the city is still slowly sinking into the lagoon.
Place: The Grand Canal, Venice, Italy
The unique advantage of this city, which grew little by little, was its harbor location at the intersection of the Occident (western Europe) and the Orient (the Middle East and Asia Minor). Throughout the Middle Ages, Venetian merchants held a monopoly on the riches coming from the Orient, and the city was able to develop into an empire. During the sixteenth century, buildings were constructed on wooden piles, a veritable underwater forest holding up one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Slowly but surely, Venice organized its existence on and around the water that was a vital part of its infrastructure. Through water, the City of the Doges conducted business, communicated with the outside world, grew and prospered. Today, Venice is still threatened by the very element that is the source of its splendor. Pumping out larger and larger quantities of underground water has caused the level of the lagoon to sink down. It seems that Venice is inexorably doomed to disappear into the water.
Egypt : the gift of the Nile
Without the Nile, an immense desert would extend from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. Egypt exists only because of the Nile. The river is responsible for the high population density of this region, and for the intermingling of cultures which has always characterized the area. Vestiges of human settlement date back some 5,000 years. People migrating from arid lands over the centuries found refuge on the banks of the “river god”. The Nile brought the water that allowed life to exist, making communication and crop irrigation possible. Each year, its muddy floods fertilized and regenerated the land. During the time of the Pharaohs, the Nile was worshipped as a divinity, and there was even a bureau to measure flood levels so that the proper amount of taxes could be levied on farmers. The higher the flood, the more the land was expected to produce.
Place: Aswan, Egypt
The Nile, omnipresent in both daily and spiritual life, was designated by several names according to the season of the year and the water level. The ancient Egyptians based their calendar on the floods that they thought were sent from the gods. The pharaoh was required to pay homage to these gods and be on good terms with them so that the floodwaters would rise again each year. The Nile was both the source of agricultural wealth and the sole means of communication and travel in ancient Egypt, which may explain why camels were not used in this part of the Middle East until much later.
Today, the Nile's floods no longer dictate the rhythm of Egyptian life. The Aswan Dam, built in 1960, put an end to millennial practices and brought Egypt into the modern era. The regulation of the river has made it possible to eliminate not only the sometimes devastating floods, but also terrible droughts which were responsible for famines. Land reclaimed from the desert has increased the amount of arable land. Today Egypt possesses an invaluable source of hydroelectric power, and the river is navigable throughout the year. These advantages are vital to a population that has grown in one century from 6 million to nearly 60 million inhabitants. But there has been a high price to pay. All of lower Nubia was submerged with the creation of Lake Nasser. Almost 60,000 people have had to be resettled. The delta of the Nile is receding due to erosion (the loss is no longer compensated by the silt formerly deposited by the floods). And the delta suffers particularly from an increase in the salinization of the land and the proliferation of water hyacinths, home to snails that are vectors for bilharzia disease. The rich silt has had to be replaced by industrial fertilizers, which in turn have increased the salinity of the soil.
Place: Philae, submerged Trajan Temple, Egypt
The Omayyad Dynasty: water in the desert
Visitors discovering the arid landscapes of Syria and Iraq may find it difficult to imagine that several centuries ago these were the rich agricultural regions of the former Omayyad Empire (661-750), which extended from Spain to the western edge of China at its height. Because problems concerning water provisions had been expertly solved, these lands were transformed into a veritable breadbasket, and their populations were able to settle down and become sedentary since water, sometimes brought from great distances, was stored up in sufficient quantities.
Place: Kufa, Iraq
Collecting water required engineering mastery and much hard work, especially for building dams and rerouting watercourses, while the water distribution systems (canals or aqueducts) inherited from earlier civilizations needed constant repair and maintenance. Water was collected and stored in cisterns, and used to irrigate the land as well as for drinking water. In cities, water was collected, distributed and managed by means of rigorous accounting systems, such as the Aleppo water towers. In Samarra (in present-day Iraq), all the houses were equipped with baths and latrines.
Water and Religion
Water and Myth
Water plays a role in all the major mythological systems, and features in every aspect of life, from the creation of the world to the existence of an afterlife. We now know that water was the origin of all life on earth, but earlier cultures seem to have grasped this notion through pure intuition very early on. Numerous creation myths represent the original world as a primordial ocean.
Water’s prominence in every complex society has also led to it being incorporated into culture, whether as part of religion, ritual or art, and it still continues to provide inspiration, whether spiritual or artistic, to people around the world. The physical and aesthetic properties of water give it a unique mythical-religious potential. It is always in motion, changing in form, colour and quantity, and has therefore played an important role in myths and religious rituals all over the world. From the religions of the Scandinavian Vikings, to the monotheistic desert religions of the Middle East, the importance of water in apparent across a range of different cultures. The role of Mother Ganga in Hinduism and the significance of the enormous funeral pyres in the sacred city of Varanasi, is another example of how water has come to be venerated in certain cultures.
Creation Myths
Polynesia
While fishing on the high seas, Maui, one of the most famous heroes in Polynesian mythology, caught an enormous fish. His brothers, who were fishing with him, shouted: “That's not a fish, it’s an island!” The giant fish broke the line and disappeared into the ocean. Some time later, Maui caught a type of ray. He grabbed the body of the fish which turned into the island of Hawaiki (the prehistoric name of the Society Islands in the south Pacific), whose name in Maori, Te-Ika-A-Maui, means “Maui's fish”.
Egypt
In the ancient Egyptian religion, the Nunu was a formless divinity personifying the ocean, the primeval chaos from which the world was formed. An island emerged from the Nunu making it possible for the first Egyptian god, Atum, represented by a heron, or by a falcon when he is identified as the god Ra, to be born. The gods, the humans and all living things were created from Atum's tears, symbolizing the forces of nature.
Under the Ancient Kingdom, each city had its own cosmogony and sometimes several versions of the same myths co-existed.
Japan
According to Shinto legend, the god Izanagai and his sister, the goddess Izanami, married and became the original couple of creation. They went to a bridge floating in the sky and plunged a lance down into the primordial ocean. When they withdrew the lance, they saw that it was covered with small droplets that formed the first island, Ongoro. Izanagi and Izanami built their palace there. After the birth of a first deformed child, the couple gave birth to a series of islands, including the archipelago of Japan.
Borneo
For the Iban, an Austronesian people, only two spirits existed in the beginning, Ara and Irik. They changed themselves into birds and glided effortlessly over the infinite primordial ocean. One day, Ara and Irik plunged into the abyss where they found two large eggs. One became the sky and the other became the earth.
Indian Civilisation – the Ganges
The Ganga-Ganges, especially, is the river of India, around which are intertwined the countries memories, culture and history. She has been a symbol of India's age-long culture and civilization, ever changing, ever flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga-Ganges
The history of Ganga-Ganges is as long as the history of Indian civilization. It was in this plain that the great kingdoms of Magadha, Gupta, and Mughals found their home. It is also the region that created one of the most homogenous cultures of all times in the civilizations of the world. It was also the place which created the essence of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism.
There are many stories of the Creation and coming down of Ganga-Ganges from heaven to earth. One of the stories is that Vishnu once heard Shiva play the flute and was so entranced by the music that his feet began to melt. Brahma caught the liquefied portion of Vishnu in a pot and from it created Ganga-Ganges, the river-goddess. Hence Ganga-Ganges is also known as Vishnu-padi (she-who-was-born-out-of-Vishnu's-feet).
Ganga-Ganges is the most sacred river of India. She is depicted bearing a pot and riding a makara that is sometimes identified as a crocodile, sometimes as a dolphin and sometimes as a Capricorn like sea-monster that is half fish and half elephant.
Once she flowed in the heavens but then was ordered to go down to earth. Fearing that her forceful descent might wash away the earth, the gods sought the help of Shiva. Shiva broke the fall of Ganga-Ganges by capturing her in his mighty locks. Since then, Ganga-Ganges resides on top of Shiva's head as his second wife, the first being Parvati.
The Ganga-Ganges has many names associated with its many roles in Sanskrit mythology. Bhagiratha (who brought Ganga-Ganges to the earth) himself is the source of the name Bhagirathi (of Bhagiratha), which is its initial stream, but is also another name for the Hooghly. At one point, Bhagiratha went too close to the sage Jahnu's meditation site, and the disturbed hermit immediately gulped up all the waters. Eventually, after much persuasion from Bhagiratha, the sage yielded the waters, but Ganges retained the name "Jahnavi". Another explanation for the same name is based on the word for knee in Sanskrit, Janu (akin to genus in latin), + the case form for "born of" yield Jahnavi; this is from a version of the story in which the saint released it through a slit at the knee.
Water and Culture
As well as providing inspiration for religion and myth, water has also served as the subject and stimulus for many different types of art. In art, music, and literature the sea is a familiar motif, and in several instances has provided the main subject of the artist’s studies. Water has been represented in many different ways, sometimes as symbol or in a stylized form, whilst at other times more effort has been made to capture the realist nature of water, such as during the Renaissance in late 15th century western art.
Many artists have tried to portray water in motion - a flowing stream or river, a turbulent ocean, or even a waterfall, and others have specialised in tranquil waters - lakes, slow-moving rivers, and views of a calm sea. In each case, water determines the overall mood of the image. Whilst some artists were interested in water itself, such as Leonardo da Vinci, who was fascinated by water and studied it both as an artist/scientist and as hydrological engineer, others attempted to illustrate the qualities water conveyed literally, metaphorically, symbolically, or allegorically in mythology, religion, and folklore. Often art has served cults of water, contributing images that personify both the physical and metaphysical aspects of water and the numerous water divinities.
Water and Motion
Hokusai (1760-1849) is perhaps Japan's best known artist, and ironically is also one of Japan's least Japanese artist. Japan's best-known woodblock painting, The Great Wave, is very un-Japanese. In The Great Wave, tiny humans are tossed around under giant waves, while enormous Mt. Fuji is a hill in the distance. Hokusai loved to depict water in motion: the foam of the wave is breaking into claws that grasp for the fishermen. The large wave forms a massive yin to the yang of empty space under it. The impending crash of water brings tension into the painting. In the foreground, a small peaked wave forms a miniature Mt. Fuji, which is reflected hundreds of miles away in the enormous Mt. Fuji, which shrinks through perspective; the wavelet is larger than the mountain. Instead of shoguns and nobility, we see tiny fishermen huddled into their sleek crafts; they slide down a seamount and dive straight into the wave to make it to the other side. The yin violence of Nature is dismissed by the yang relaxed confidence of expert fishermen. Oddly, though it's a sea storm, the sun is shining. This woodblock print is very peculiar: to Westerners, it seems to be the quintessential Japanese image, yet, ironically, it's quite un-Japanese. Traditional Japanese would have never painted lower-class fishermen (one of the lowest and most despised of Japanese classes); they ignored the outdoors; they would not have used perspective; they wouldn't have paid much attention to the subtle shading of the sky. We like the painting because it's familiar to us. Hokusai transformed Dutch pastoral paintings in to Japanese pastoral paintings. It seems familiar to Westerners because its source is Western art: landscape, long-distance perspective, Nature, and ordinary humans. The Giant Wave is actually a Western painting, seen through Japanese eyes.
Subject: The Breaking Wave Off Kanagawa. Also called The Great Wave. Woodblock print from Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Fuji, which are the high point of Japanese prints. The original is at the Hakone Museum in Japan.
A more radical depiction of the sea in the Western art is Turner’s Snowstorm at Sea. Turner’s impressionistic vision of the swirling elements represents his interest in the power of the natural elements, reflecting his Romantic heritage and interest in the sublime. The Steamboat is portrayed as the centre of a dynamic, swirling nexus of cloud and water, and symbol of the perpetual flux of nature, with humanity itself caught in the eye of the storm. Turner experienced the power of the nature first hand whilst preparing for this picture; he was allegedly strapped to the mast of a boat during a storm at sea in order to experience the awesome power of the elements.
Subject: Joseph Mallard William Turner, Snowstorm at Sea: Steamboat of the Harbours Mouth, 1842
Tranquil Water
Claude Monet’s depictions of his Japanese lily pond in Giverny attest to his obsession during the last years of his life with the reflection and refraction of light upon the surface of water. The images below highlight the variety and beauty of his different interpretations of the play of light and colour on the mirror-like surface of the pond, and impart an aura of calm, indicating Monet’s debt to Japanese art and culture.
Subject: Claude Monet, Water Lilies (the Clouds), 1903, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection
Subject: Claude Monet, Waterlilies, 1906, Oil on Canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago
Subject: Claude Monet, Waterlilies, Green Reflection, Left Part, 1916 – 1923, Orangerie, Paris
Leonardo Da Vinci and Water
As this drawing suggests, Leonardo da Vinci was both puzzled and fascinated by water.
Subject: Leonardo, Old Man with Water Studies, c. 1513
For him it was full of paradox:
Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, sometimes acid and sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin, sometimes it is seen bringing hurt or pestilence, sometime health-giving, sometimes poisonous. It suffers change into as many natures as are the different places through which it passes. And as the mirror changes with the colour of its subject, so it alters with the nature of the place, becoming noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salty, incarnadined, mournful, raging, angry, red, yellow, green, black, blue, greasy, fat or slim. Sometimes it starts a conflagration, sometimes it extinguishes one; is warm and is cold, carries away or sets down, hollows out or builds up, tears or establishes, fills or empties, raises itself or burrows down, speeds or is still; is the cause at times of life or death, or increase or privation, nourishes at times and at others does the contrary; at times has a tang, at times is without savor, sometimes submerging the valleys with great floods. In time and with water, everything changes.
Leonardo described water as "the vehicle of nature" ("vetturale di natura"), believing water to be to the world what blood is to our bodies. He also was terrified by water’s destructive capacity, and had witnessed great storms, and conducted numerous studies of the motion of water. Leonardo studied water also with the view to learning how to control it. Throughout his life, Leonardo was obsessed with a fear of a great watery cataclysm. In his drawings and in his writings he describes terrible floods and inundations and great storms.
Subject: Leonardo, Storm over an Alpine Valley
(Windsor, Royal Library, c. 1499)
Subject: Leonardo, End of the World
(Windsor, Royal Library, 1515)
His drawings indicate a special fear of swirling waters. There is nothing more terrifying, he felt, than a swollen river breaking its banks and sweeping people, animals, houses, trees, and even the land itself down into the sea. Leonardo had witnessed such disasters when the Arno river burst its banks on 12 January 1466, and again in 1478. Perhaps as a result of these events, and as a way of dealing with his fears, Leonardo devoted a lot energy to developing ways or devices to control and move water around water.
Subject: Leonardo, Machine for raising water
(Codex Atlanticus, f. 26v)
He also designed locks and canal systems, and invented machines for excavating canals.
Subject: Leonardo, Machine for excavating canals
(Codex Atlanticus, f. 4v)
One large scale but never realized plan was for a navigable canal linking Florence to the sea. The scheme included cutting a series of giant steps with locks to enable ships to sail up into the hills. The water would be raised from one level to the next by a huge siphon. In Milan, he worked on a system of locks and paddle wheels for washing the streets. He also had plans for draining the unhealthy marshes of the Val di Chiana.
Water and Music - Claude Debussy and La Mer
La Mer, composed between 1903 and 1905, is Debussy's most popular and widely performed concert work. The work is perhaps best described as the musical expression of impressionist art such as the Noctures of Whistler (see below), and aims to achieve the same type of effect in its description of the subtle play of the light and sound of the sea. In the music of La Mer conjures up many of the sensations associated with the sea: the titles of the three "symphonic sketches" - "From dawn to midday on the sea", "Play of the waves", "Dialogue of the wind and the sea" - show how explicit the inspiration was. However, he also wanted his art to sound free, in a particular way, with 'a freedom derived not from a more or less literal reproduction of Nature, but from the mysterious correspondences between nature and the imagination'.
He took three years to complete La mer, starting after the premiere of his opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and interrupted by the upheavals of leaving his wife Lily for the worldly Emma Bardac (dedicatee of several of Fauré's works and mother of the Dolly enshrined in his 'Dolly' Suite). Some of Debussy's final adjustments to the score were made while staying at the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, in 1905, though his feelings for the sea had been formed during childhood stays by the Mediterranean and visits to Normandy.
Subject: Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Chelsea
1871; Oil on wood, 50.2 x 60.8 cm; Tate Gallery, London