History

Environmental disasters in the pre-modern Middle East were replete in occurrence and rife with consequence. From the awful mortalities of the Black Death to the visitations of cold and desiccation in the little Ice Age, all manner of tragedies struck the inhabitants of this part of the world, leaving scarcely a single generation untouched by major calamity. Disasters brought suffering and left memories of their trauma, passed along in narratives that color the historical chronicles. But disasters also brought change – for good or for ill-some of it profound and long-term in nature. Scholars of the Middle East have only recently become aware of how closely environmental disasters are tied in to long-term historical change. Furthermore, these same disasters tell us a great deal about these changes themselves. Disasters open for us windows of perception, through which we can see with awestruck clarity. It is in this light that we can at times see causation and consequence via interpretive examination of centuries' old tragedies. This workshop will foster research into the history of these environmental disasters in the Middle East, focusing on Mamluk Egypt and Syria, 1250 to 1517 CE. There is much ground to cover and fertile terrain for innovative research. While Mamluk Egypt is recognized for its wealth of sources for environmental disaster, it is becoming increasingly clear that the body of evidence for Mamluk Syria is even richer – and much of this wholly untilled. 1 This workshop hopes to 1 As example: the rather astonishing body of statistical evidence for the Black Death's mortality in Damascus and Aleppo.

This article examines how plague depopulation had a direct effect on the environment of the Egyptian province of al-Buh ˙ ayra in the late medieval period. Egypt witnessed a period of robust expansion and irrigation infrastructure development in late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. This irrigation infrastructure was the key to the region's agricultural wealth and the Mamluk sultanate expended a great deal of energy in developing, improving, and expanding this system in the province of al-Buh ˙ ayra. It is estimated that overall agricultural output increased by as much as 50 % between 1250 and 1315. Al-Buh ˙ ayra was at the center of this expansion, where the Mamluk sultanate may have increased its cultivated area by some 60,000 hectares through excavation projects on the Na ¯s ˙ ir, T ˙ ayriyya, and Alexandria Canals. It seems clear that plague depopulation, starting in 1347, brought a halt to all of this growth and started Egypt on a path of severe economic decline. The irrigation system suffered heavily during this period, which extended from the mid fourteenth century well into the early modern period. This article focuses on how damage to the irrigation system profoundly altered the environment of this province. Irrigation decay led to desiccation in many areas, depriving rich farmland of its water supply, altered the saline balance of the soil, had a profound effect on the usage of viable flood basin acreage, and shifted the land's ecology from arable to pasture, thereby shifting the balance of power from the peasants to the Bedouins. The province of al-Buh ˙ ayra provides a microcosm of what was happening in other parts of Egypt, and it offers us a window into some of the devastating changes that plague mortality was having on the Islamic world in the late medieval period.

this Excel file uses conditional format to render 3-D via filtered low resolution processing of SRTM data. The intent is to provide the Nile Delta on a single worksheet. The Buhayra province in the North West also represents the canal system of the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt (1250-1517 CE)

Napoleon’s savants and European colonial engineers were quite consistent and categorical about one thing: Egypt had no water law – neither oral nor (more particularly) written. They rejected the idea that there had ever been any sort of rules to prevent conflict over the usage of Nile flood water (which could be especially problematic in low-volume flood years). They went on to maintain that - even if there once had been some sort of water law, the law - and its associated text - was only to be found in the very distant past (in Greco-Roman antiquity). They thus cleanly rejected the notion that Islamic Civilization was ever capable of producing and implementing any sort of ordered rules for water usage. As a long-overdue correction to this age-old assumption, we present here the textual and analytical evidence for Islamic Egypt’s water law. Though one or two scholars have noted the existence of the texts we analyze here, the water law contained herein has in fact never been recognized for what it actually was. So it seems fair to say that the ordered hydraulic system we present in this study has not only been denied proper scrutiny, it has surprisingly escaped detection altogether. We analyze here Islamic Egypt’s water law.
This water law was not merely oral but was in fact issued as a comprehensive, written text that was well-established and widely-implemented. It was a fundamental and even vital part of Islamic Egypt's Nile irrigation system. It was created in order to control and regulate demand so that the overuse of this common resource (during low-volume Nile flood years) would not lead to the kind of situation that we have modeled in our computer simulations (i.e., a Tragedy of the Commons). The two surviving texts of water law, as provided by al-Makhzūmī (via al-Maqrīzī’s Khiṭaṭ) for the latter 1100s CE, and Ibn Mammātī after him, detail the logic, ingenuity and sophistication of these hydraulic rules. What we do in this study is to look at exactly how hydraulic law-and-order was applied to the Alexandria canal. The Alexandria canal had been newly excavated at this time, a time when the water law appears to have been composed (by evidence of the rules within: 404/1013). The water law as it was applied to this famous canal lays out a system by which villages took turns at taking in water for their flood basins (turns evenly separated - both spatially and temporally). In this precise system laid down by written law, six turns at water usage occur in eight-day intervals – intervals that collectively stretched out over a 48-day period, a period that lasted from mid-August to late-September. Our conclusion is that this water law established an effective demand-rotation regime, one that we know (via surviving government memoranda from the Ayyubid period that we present and discuss in this study) was avidly enforced by the authority of the provincial governor and his staff. The water law functioned very effectively in our computer simulations - and it seems to have done so in practice as well. The same water law – with variations dependent upon terrain, elevation, volumetric concerns, and even conditional clauses for flood variations - was applied throughout the Nile Delta in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and early Mamluk periods – as it can be clearly discerned in the fragmented survivals of the original texts. It can also be glimpsed in abundant citations of these rules in Mamluk-era texts. Through the use of water law, Islamic Egypt was able to dramatically expand flood basin terrain (and cultivated acreage) in the Nile Delta (969-1348 CE), bringing prosperity to the inhabitants of Egypt's floodplain.  Water law was one of the underpinnings of a long interval of hydraulic sophistication for Egypt - and for medieval Islam, an interval that is only now beginning to receive proper attention.

The dimensions of the Black Death’s mortality in Europe have long been examined and estimates of its death toll there have risen in the last two decades of scholarship. While there is much left to discover, the mortality of the Black Death in other areas of the world (the Near East, the Far East, South Asia, and Africa) remains, in relative terms, almost unexamined. While a number of scholars have made exemplary contributions to our understanding of the mortality of the second plague pandemic in the Middle East (1347-1844 CE: Shoshan, 1981, Raymond, 1981, Panzac, 1993, Mikhail, 2008, Stearns 2011, Ayalon, 2014, Varlik, 2015, Borsch and Sabraa, 2016, Didelot, 2017), the untimely death of the pioneering Michael Dols (Black Death in the Middle East, 1977) was in many ways both the first and the last word on the subject of Black Death mortality in the Middle East.
This study hopes to get the ball rolling again by approaching the question of mortality with some new tools. Starting on the basis of applying the Keeling and Gilligan (2000) nine-differential equation plague model to the regression of recorded death tolls (which we tested for 1400s Cairo Borsch and Sabraa Mamluk Studies Review 2016) our hope for improving our quantitative read of the situation rests upon the new method we introduce here, one that uses the quintessentially Islamic character of Middle Eastern civic institutions (two separate institutions that counted plague deaths) to quantify a phenomenon as yet never studied quantitatively: the flight of desperate rural refugees – i.e. those many (the rural majority) who fled the plague, the Black Death especially, only to die of it, almost always penniless, anonymous, and utterly alone, in Middle Eastern cities that most of them had never seen before. If this first attempt shows promise, the hope is that we may be better equipped to understand the sometimes seemingly inexplicable - seemingly the astronomically - high urban death tolls that have made quantification of plague mortality for the Middle East so difficult.