The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period

This paper presents a documentary and archaeological study of the watermills in Ottoman Mosul to gain a political and social-economic understanding of the waterresource management in Mosul and its northeastern hinterland in the early modern period. Watermills are of importance to historians, as the simple buildings equipped with sophisticated hydraulic devices, for teasing out various strands of water-resource management and agricultural economies from a regional and longue-dureé perspective. By synthesizing historical and archaeological methodological approaches, this paper aims to address the questions of what historical legacy of Mosul was left to the Ottoman Empire regarding the water infrastructure, including watermills and irrigation systems, and what contribution the Ottoman administration made to the development of Mosul's water infrastructure. It presents an archaeological examination of a group of milling installations in Wadi Bandawai in the north of Mosul, demonstrating changes in settlement patterns during the long Islamic period, from the 7th to early 20th centuries, and also drawing attention to methodological problems with Islamic and Ottoman archaeology concerning the periodization of material culture.

Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient �� (2023) 237–287 brill.com/jesh The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period Onur Usta Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Department of History, Çanakkale, Turkey onurusta@comu.edu.tr, onurustaonur@gmail.com Cristina Tonghini Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Department of Humanities, Venice, Italy tonghini@unive.it Abstract This paper presents a documentary and archaeological study of the watermills in Ottoman Mosul to gain a political and social-economic understanding of the waterresource management in Mosul and its north-eastern hinterland in the early modern period. Watermills are of importance to historians, as the simple buildings equipped with sophisticated hydraulic devices, for teasing out various strands of water-resource management and agricultural economies from a regional and longue-dureé perspective. By synthesizing historical and archaeological methodological approaches, this paper aims to address the questions of what historical legacy of Mosul was left to the Ottoman Empire regarding the water infrastructure, including watermills and irrigation systems, and what contribution the Ottoman administration made to the development of Mosul’s water infrastructure. It presents an archaeological examination of a group of milling installations in Wadi Bandawai in the north of Mosul, demonstrating changes in settlement patterns during the long Islamic period, from the 7th to early 20th centuries, and also drawing attention to methodological problems with Islamic and Ottoman archaeology concerning the periodization of material culture. Keywords watermill – irrigation – Mosul – Iraq – Ottoman Empire © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.11�3/15�85209-12341595 238 Usta and Tonghini Introduction* This paper shows that the watermills and irrigation systems in the northeastern hinterland of Mosul reached a stable and advanced stage of development, albeit with intermittent setbacks, under Ottoman rule, which started from the early 16th century onwards. However, this progress did not materialize as a result of direct intervention by the Ottoman state, but was spontaneously realized by the cooperation of anonymous small farmer groups and peasants as well as the entrepreneurial skills of local elites. This paper argues that the major factor that determined the sites of the watermills was their proximity to the irrigation network. It shows that the majority of milling installations remained in permanent locations in the longue durée of the Islamic period, despite the settlements being constantly relocated. Most of the watermills were located in the heartland of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which is historically identified with the massive construction of canals, dykes, dams, and other such hydraulic infrastructure.1 When we consider the need for artificial water connections to be harnessed as a source of energy for the mills, the sites for the watermills were not randomly chosen. In this respect, a causal link can be established between the renovation/reuse of watermills and improvement * Cristina Tonghini contributed to this paper in Section 4 for the archaeological discussion of watermills, while the other sections based on the documentary and historical examination of watermills were written by Onur Usta. 1 The literature on the irrigation works of the Neo-Assyrian Empire is extensive and has been compiled in almost a century. For an earlier introductory work, see Thorkild Jacobsen and Seton Lloyd, Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1935): 33–39. For recent works based on textual sources, see Stephanie Dalley, “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens: Cuneiform and Classical Sources Reconciled.” Iraq 56 (1994): 45–58. Idem., “Water Management in Assyria from the Ninth to the Seventh Centuries BC.” ARAM 13–14 (2002): 448–455. A general evaluation of the irrigation systems in ancient Near East, see also Tony James Wilkinson and Louise Rayne, “Hydraulic Landscapes and Imperial Power in the Near East.” Water History 2 (2010): 120–123. For recent archaeological studies and surface surveys, see Jason Ur, “Sennacherib’s Northern Assyrian Canals: New Insights from Satellite Imagery and Aerial Photography.” Iraq 67–1 (Papers of the 49th Recontre Assyriologique Internationale, Part Two) (Spring, 2005): 317–345. Giuseppe Scardozzi, “Multitemporal Satellite Images for Knowledge of the Assyrian Capital Cities and for Monitoring Landscape Transformations in the Upper Course of Tigris River.” International Journal of Geophysics, vol. 2011, Article ID: 917306: 1–17. Daniele Morandi Bonacossi and Marco Iamoni, “Landscape and Settlement in the Eastern Upper Iraqi Tigris and Navkur Plains: The Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project, Seasons 2012–2013.” Iraq 77 (2015): 9–39. Bonacossi, “Water for Nineveh. The Nineveh Irrigation System in the regional context of the ‘Assyrian Triangle’: A First Geoarchaeological Assessment.” In Water for Assyria, ed. Hartmut Kühne (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018): 77–116. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 239 of the irrigation system, and thus the presence of still-standing watermills in Ottoman Mosul can be taken as evidence of an efficient irrigation system, probably partially similar to that of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Considering the ways that the watermills were directly linked to changes in the political landscape of the Near East, this paper first investigates the regional character of water-resource management in Iraq in the context of a broader Near Eastern history in order to have a better understanding of the Ottoman impact on the watermills and other water infrastructures in Mosul during the 16th century. In the second section of the paper, Cristina Tonghini presents an archaeological survey of a group of abandoned watermills located in the northeastern hinterland of Mosul and draws attention to certain methodological limitations of landscape archaeology in the Near East, for example, the use of broad timelines for the Islamic period and the difficulties in identifying settlements, which are scattered over large rural areas remote from the main centers of population. She underscores the importance of watermills as part of the material culture in the field of Ottoman archaeology, considering the difficulties of dividing the Ottoman settlement history into distinct periods as a consequence of the fragmentary nature of the material culture components in rural areas. In addition to these methodological issues, her stratigraphic analyses of the surveyed watermills can help us grasp the nature of early Ottoman rule in Mosul as a period of economic recovery after a prolonged population decline and settlement abandonment caused by the Mongol invasions.2 After this archaeological discussion, the subsequent sections of this paper are devoted to examining the documentary sources about watermills. 2 The Mongols laid siege to Baghdad in 1258 and Mosul in 1265. Despite the recovery period in the aftermath of the invasions, the initial impact of the Mongol raids was rather devastating, but the degree of their damage varied regionally, depending on the social and economic conditions in the regions before the eve of the invasions. David Morgan, The Mongols, 2nd edition (Malden Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2007). For a general information from a British orientalist perspective on the Mongol invasions in Iraq, see Stephen Hemsley Longrigg, Four Centuries of Modern Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925): 12–24. See also Muhammad Rashid Al-Feel, The Historical Geography of Iraq Between the Mongolian and Ottoman Conquests 1258–1534, I–II (Nejef: Al-Adab Press, 1965). Eliyahu Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1976): 248–279. For a detailed map showing the phases of the Mongol expansion over Iran and Iraq, see Peter Sluglett and Andrew Currie, Atlas of Islamic History (London: Routledge, 2014): 46. See also, Mahmood Khalil, Al-Moghul fi-al Mawsil wa al-Jazira (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Mosul 1985): 64–117. Thabit A.J. Abdullah, A Short History of Iraq, 2nd edition (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2011): 31–49. John Robertson, Iraq: A History (London: Oneworld Book, 2015): 223–230. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 240 1 Usta and Tonghini Watermills and Regional History In the field of environmental history, Alan Mikhail proposes a useful approach for enhancing our understanding of the periods in Ottoman history by postulating that the Ottoman Empire was an ecosystem where distant regions were interconnected chronologically and transcontinentally in regard to the effects of small changes and human experience on spaces.3 In this way, Ottoman history can be examined in a broader environmental and ecological perspective and periodized according to the experiences and stories of the non-human historical agents, such as draught animals and water canals in remote provinces.4 The present paper comprehends the importance of this perspective and attempts to periodize the history of Ottoman Mosul through the lens of watermills. To this end, we have examined a range of Ottoman primary sources from the Presidency State Archives in Istanbul, which comprise the tax-register series, the series of fiscal accounts, and finance records for the religious endowments (awqāf).5 3 Alan Mikhail, Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (Chicago &London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017): 200. 4 Ibid.: 201. 5 In this paper, I rely on the data from the tax-register series, as are called Mufassal Tapu Tahrir Defterleri in Turkish, as the main bulk of the archival sources for the 16th century. The Ottoman tax-registers can be resembled to the Domesday Book of Britain in the medieval period in terms of content and purpose. It was a customary practice of the Ottoman administration to record every tax resource, for example male population, hives, sheep, crops, mills, factories, etc., in the conquered lands the during the 15th and 16th centuries. Due to some administrative and economic changes, the practice of keeping such tax-registers was abandoned at the turn of the 17th century. For a general information about the tax-register series, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 86–95. For Mosul, there were four tax-registers, compiled in 1526 (TT. d. 134), 1540 (TT. d. 195), 1558 (TT. d. 308) and 1575 (TT. d. 660), respectively. The first register contains a rather concise information about the tax-resources, and actually it is found as a synopsis in several pages in the tax-registers of Diyarbekir, whereas the other three provide more information about watermills and settlements. Therefore, the last three of the tax-registers are taken into examination in this paper. The tax-registers have been studied by Bayatlı and Gündüz previously, but their studies are literally based on the transliteration of the tax-registers into modern Turkish. Nilüfer Bayatlı, XVI. Yüzyılda Musul Eyâleti (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi,1999). Ahmet Gündüz, Osmanlı İdaresinde Musul (1523–1639) (Elazığ: Fırat Üniversitesi Basımevi, 2003). In some places, there are several misreading for the settlement names, particularly in Bayatlı’s work. Therefore, I needed to closely examine the tax-registers by myself while collecting the data for watermills and their settlements, but still I also benefited from the guidance of Gündüz’s book when necessary. For the 17th and 18th centuries, I patiently read through the series of fiscal accounts, Maliyeden Müdevver Defterler, which are found in the Presidency of State Archive in Istanbul. For the endowment records, I also used the documents both from the Archive of the JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 241 The 16th century was marked by a growing need for watermills to grind grain in Mosul, as Mosul’s hinterland witnessed demographic growth and settlement expansion as well as a dramatic increase in grain production in that period.6 It would be tempting to discuss the question of how watermills and their owners experienced the growth trend in the 16th century and what methods and measures were adopted by millers in matters regarding improvement of the irrigation system. The tax-registers do not enable us to answer all these questions, but nevertheless a detailed examination of the tax-registers, supported by archaeological findings, may define the essential nature of water-resource management in Mosul by discussing the economic and social aspects of the watermills. For example, as suggested above, the distribution of watermills in the countryside of Mosul shows spatial continuity with the ancient water canals whose skeletons have now been widely unearthed by the archeological surveys. In the Ottoman period, the mill owners could set aside certain sections of the canals that fed the mills as private property, in accordance with Islamic law, which allows someone to own the freehold of the land, provided that they irrigate the land with their own capital and labor.7 Therefore, the mill owners in 16th-century Mosul can be regarded as small rural entrepreneurs who privately held modest plots of land around their own mill buildings and adjacent water channels, although the tax-registers neither show the identity of the mill owners nor associate the mills with the patronage of any religious institution, such as mosques or monasteries, or the supervision of a family waqf. The anonymous character of mill ownership may suggest that an intervention of state elites and institutionalized control did not have a major role in developing the water infrastructure in the 16th-century Mosul. General Directorate of the Foundations in Ankara and from the Presidency of State Archive in Istanbul. 6 Dina Rizk Khoury, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul, 1540–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 25–30. A similar growth trend for the 16th century is also visible through the tax-registers of the other regions in the Ottoman Empire. For the increases in the number of watermills, for example in western Anatolia, see Feridun M. Emecen, XVI. Asırda Manisa Kazâsı, 2nd edition (Ankara: Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 2013): 259. Turan Gökçe, XVI. ve XVII. Yüzyıllarda Lâzıkıyye (Denizli) Kazâsı (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2000): 384. For eastern Anatolia, see Ahmet Nezihi Turan, XVI. Yüzyılda Ruha (Urfa) Sancağı (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2012): 110. İsmet Miroğlu, Kemah Sancağı ve Erzincan Kazası (1520–1566) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2014): 224. It is necessary to cite Géza Dávid for the watermills in Ottoman Hungary, Géza Dávid, 16. Yüzyılda Simontornya Sancağı-Osmanlı Macaristanʾında Toplum, Ekonomi ve Yönetim (A Simontornyai szandzsák a 16. Században) trans. from Hungarian into Turkish by Hilmi Ortaç (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları,1999): 136–137. 7 Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982): 142–143. For a good summary of Ottoman law about the property rights for water, see Fatma Şensoy, İstanbulʾun Vakıf Su Tarihi (Istanbul: Kitabevi Yayınları, 2020): 36–58. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 242 Usta and Tonghini Regarding the countryside of Mosul, the 17th century is portrayed as a period of economic decline and depopulation caused by nomadization with the rise of tribal dominance and increased militarization due to the Ottoman-Safavid conflicts.8 In the fiscal accounts, several ruined mills appear to have been renovated and reused towards the end of the 17th century, which suggests that some of the watermills had remained dilapidated and idle prior to this time due to a possible deterioration and negligence concerning other components of the water infrastructure. Nevertheless, it is impossible to know how many of the watermills in the 16th century went out of use in the 17th century, considering that the administrative practice of keeping the tax-registers was discontinued in large parts of the empire, including Mosul, after the end of the 16th century. It is probable that the renovated watermills indicated by the fiscal accounts were somehow abandoned at some point prior to the end of the 17th century. Although rural depopulation and economic decline may explain the abandonment of watermills in general, this paper argues that flood disasters, in particular, wreaked havoc on the channels to which mills were connected. It is likely that frequent flooding made the availability of labor in the 17th century more important than before for the maintenance of the canals and sluices connected to the mills; however, mobilizing a workforce could not be easy in a landscape where population had diminished. The existence of abandoned and dilapidated watermills in rural Mosul set the stage for a shift in the pattern of mill ownership from the anonymous common people to the local elites towards the end of the 17th century, because only the local elites and urban entrepreneurs could afford to provide the capital and organize the workforce necessary for the renovation and reuse of watermills. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when the city of Mosul began to draw more economic surplus from its rural hinterland with the commercialization of agriculture, the watermills that appear in documents were subject to the 8 Khoury, State and Provincial Society: 39–41. There is a growing body of literature suggesting that large parts of the Ottoman Empire, particularly Anatolia and the Arab lands, experienced the varying degrees of economic hardships and social distress in the forms of provincial rebellions, dearth, famines and land desertion during the 17th century. For a selection of recent studies in this literature, see Oktay Özel, “Population Changes in Ottoman Anatolia During the 16th and 17th centuries: The ‘Demographic Crisis’ Reconsidered.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 36 (2004): 183–205. Idem., “The Question of Abandoned Villages in Ottoman Anatolia.” In Ottoman Rural Societies and Economies-Halycon Days in Crete VIII (A Symposium Held in Rethymno, 13–15 January 2012), ed. E. Kolovos (Rethymno: Crete University Press, 2015): 95–130. Idem., The Collapse of Rural Order in Ottoman Anatolia-Amasya 1576–1643 (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2016). See also, Sam White, Climate of Rebellion in the early modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 243 financial management of the awqāf established by the local elites.9 Although these elites appear to have monopolized the mills with their own waqf, the watermills gained a social function by frequently subsidizing the public facilities that were under waqf management. 2 Why Study Watermills? Before outlining the historical framework of the water infrastructure in Mosul, it may be useful to explain why watermills are worthy of scientific attention and have thus become the focus of this research. Watermills symbolize human attempts to cope with ecological restraints in the historical landscape and thus a study of watermills is essential for our understanding of the environmental and social-economic dynamics which shaped the regional history of the Near East. It was essential to supply the watermills with a continuous and forceful water flow to keep them running efficiently, even in the arid summers when rivers dried up. Therefore, the watermills in the barren and semi-arid landscape of the Near East needed to be connected to a permanent artificial network of channels to obtain water. The water flowed through an inclined channel and then was accelerated with the effect of gravity, and after having reached sufficient speed and power, it hit the paddles of a wheel from above and then turned the wheel. The mill’s mechanism was rotated on a vertical shaft connected to a horizontally positioned wheel on which the millstone was placed. In a similar mechanism that was designed to obtain even more power, the water was alternatively dropped down through a penstock tower and became pressurized at the bottom through a nozzle, thus hitting the paddles harder and faster. The watermills powered by drop-towers were the most preferred and widespread ones in Mosul and the Near East generally because of the necessity for the efficient use of water in a semi-arid environment.10 9 10 Khoury, State and Provincial Society: 195. Mosul began to grow in economy and production in line with its increased regional trade relations in the 19th century. See, Idem., “The Introduction of Commercial Agriculture in the Province of Mosul and its Effects on the Peasantry, 1750–1850.” In Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East, eds. Çağlar Keyder and Faruk Tabak (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991): 155–171. Sarah D. Shields, Mosul Before Iraq—Like Bees Making Five-Sided Cells (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000): 117–122. Michael Harverson, “Watermills in Iran.” Iran 31 (1993): 152. Alison McQuitty, “WaterMills in Jordan: Technology, Typology, Dating and Development.” Studies in History and Archaeology of Jordan, 5 (Department of Antiquities: Amman, 1995): 746–747. James A. Neely, “Sasanian period drop-tower gristmills on the Deh Luran Plain, southwestern Iran.” Journal of Field Archaeology, 36 (2011): 236–239. Charlotte Schriwer, Water and Technology JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 244 Usta and Tonghini Watermills can thus be regarded as a tangible achievement of humans interacting with the environment for water-resource management. Just as an increase in the number of watermills may indicate an expansion of grain cultivation, and concomitantly demographic and economic growth within a particular region, so too it may show that the water resources were being managed with canals and weirs. Conversely, the presence of many derelict mills in a landscape may point not only to an economic decline or recession in grain production, but also a technological deterioration in water-resource management. Aside from their hydrological function, watermills also lay at the heart of social relations by functioning as a major food hub where grain was received and then processed into flour to be dispatched to every corner of the countryside. The mill owners were therefore in an advantageous position to take a share of the grain economy through milling fees in cash or in kind. In general, mill ownership was the prerogative of the upper echelons of society in many regions from the Levant to Europe during the Medieval period and even later, because the construction and maintenance of a mill would cost a substantial fortune for those with a meagre income.11 The transition in mill ownership from communal right of use to monopolistic possession by the upper classes was a recurrent feature in the social and economic history of many parts of the Near Eastern countryside. Concerning water-resource management, the impact of Ottoman administration on Iraq can be seen in the form of canal projects in southern Mesopotamia, including Baghdad and Basra. In the period up to the end of the 19th century, these projects were initiated by the interest and participation 11 in Levantine Society, 1300–1900: An Historical, Archaeological and Architectural Analysis (BAR Publishing: Oxford, 2016): 4–5. Jean-Pierre Brun, “Les Moulins Hydrauliques Dans l’Antiquité.” In Archéologie des moulins hydrauliques, à traction animale et à vent des origines à l’époque médiévale et moderne en Europe et dans le monde méditerranéen, eds. L. Jacottey and G.Rollier (Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2016): 39–40. Schriwer, Water and Technology in Levantine Society, 1300–1900: 88–89. Stephen McPhillips, “Harnessing Hydraulic Power in Ottoman Syria.” In Landscapes of the Islamic World (Archaeology, History and Ethnography), eds. by Stephen McPhillips and Paul D. Wordsworth (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016): 158. Karina Van Der Beek, “Political fragmentation, competition, and investment decisions: the medieval grinding industry in Ponthieu, France, 1150–1250.” Economic History Review 63/3 (2010): 665. K.R. Hopwood, “The Use of Material Culture in Writing Ottoman History.” Archivum Ottomanicum 18 (2000): 201. Eugene L. Rogan, “Reconstructing Water Mills in Late Ottoman Transjordan.” Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan 5 (Amman, 1995): 753–754. Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, trans. by Siân Reynolds (London: Fontana Press, 1990): 146. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 245 of local governors rather than direct intervention of the central government.12 However, there is no documentation mentioning that prominent figures such as sultans and pashas launched an irrigation project in Mosul and its hinterland during the Ottoman period. It is probable that the financial expenditure deterred the Ottoman administration from improving the permanent irrigation system in Iraq. Instead, the Ottomans opted for a cost-free choice to improve the irrigation system by handing over the management of water-related works to local entrepreneurs and farmers.13 In consequence, the case of Mosul presented a new paradigm for irrigation projects in the semi-arid landscape of the Near East, shifting from a state-sponsored initiative to a local and civic initiative. 3 Historical Background of the Water Infrastructure in Mosul In the rural landscape around Mosul, the Neo-Assyrian Empire (912–612 BC) constructed an efficient system of irrigation to increase agricultural growth and create a granary at its heartland in order to feed its imperial army and conquered lands.14 Although annual rainfall was sufficient to grow wheat and barley, the ancient Assyrians realized the necessity of an irrigation system for a better and more stable crop throughout the year.15 Faisal Husain has stressed that high agricultural productivity was unfeasible in Iraq unless the Tigris and Euphrates were tamed with an efficient irrigation system, because the water flow fluctuation of both rivers was incompatible with the seasonal water requirement of the plants.16 For this reason, the ancient Assyrians diverted water from springs on the Zagros foothills into the rivers via canals to gain access to a water flow, even in dry seasons.17 In his famous theory of ‘hydraulic civilization and oriental despotism’, Karl Wittfogel proposes that the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and India were able to survive only with an oppressive and bureaucratic state 12 13 14 15 16 17 Rhoads Murphey, “The Ottoman Centuries in Iraq: Legacy or Aftermath? A Survey Study of Mesopotamian Hydrology and Ottoman Irrigation Projects.” In Journal of Turkish Studies-Türklük Bilgisi Araştırmaları, eds. by Şinasi Tekin and Gönül Alpay Tekin, 11 (1987): 21–25. Faisal Husain, Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021): 63–65. Bonacossi and Iamoni, “Landscape and Settlement in the Eastern Upper Iraqi Tigris”: 25. Ur, “Sennacherib’s Northern Assyrian Canals:”: 324. Bonacossi, “Water for Nineveh”: 84–85. Husain, Rivers of the Sultan: 66. Ur, “Sennacherib’s Northern Assyrian Canals:”: 322. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 24� Usta and Tonghini apparatus, as they depended on coercive control to mobilize enough manpower to rehabilitate their riverine landscapes with water canals and thereby prevent drought and floods.18 His theory might lead us to assume that the construction of irrigation projects could only be accomplished under the effective supervision of a mighty empire. It is true to a certain extent that acquiring capital and manpower for the construction of an irrigation infrastructure would have been easier with a bureaucratic state mechanism.19 However, intervention by the state was not necessary in all cases. For example, Mikhail has demonstrated for Ottoman Egypt that the continuation of a large irrigation system was more contingent on the local initiative of peasants and their willingness to cooperate with the central government for removal of silt and deposits clogging the canals and riverbeds, than on the sanctioned power of a highly bureaucratized state apparatus.20 Elsewhere, the hydraulic systems in northern Syria and the Levant continued in uninterrupted operation from the Sasanian period to the Ottoman thanks to the cooperation of local communities.21 Very little is known about the state of the watermills and irrigation infrastructure in Mosul before the Ottoman conquest. Although the irrigation infrastructure, including watermills, showed an ephemeral improvement under the supervision of the regional rulers who presided over Mosul and its environs in the Middle Islamic Period, it is probable that a long-term development of irrigation systems was hindered by the political instabilities that were initiated by the Mongol invasions in the second half of the 13th century and the Timurid invasion in the early 15th century. Therefore, the archaeological evidence in this paper and the documentary sources of the Middle Islamic Period provide no clear indication that the hydraulic systems continued uninterruptedly until the period of Ottoman administration. When Mosul was conquered in 1517, it is likely that the Ottoman rulers encountered a local scene in which the village communities fended for themselves in the management and maintenance of the water infrastructure. In general, building and maintaining watermills and irrigation systems could be well handled under the auspices of a waqf or religious endowment, or with the oversight of the state elites.22 However, the villagers of Mosul seemed to have been devoid of such 18 19 20 21 22 Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1963): 23–26. Ibid.: 50–51. Alan Mikhail, Under Osman’s Tree: 39–40; Idem., Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 31–34. Tony James Wilkinson and Louise Rayne, “Hydraulic Landscapes and Imperial Power in the Near East.” Water History 2 (2010): 120–123. Schriwer, Water and Technology in Levantine Society: 86. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 247 financial patronage, given that the revenues from neither awqāf nor khāss (the tax-revenues from towns and villages separated for the Sultan and his retinue) appear to have included watermills in the tax-registers of Mosul.23 The most probable reason for the non-institutionalized management of the watermills was that grain production and wheat consumption were on a subsistence level and therefore mills only served to meet the local demand of the village communities for grinding grain; in other words, they were not integrated into a wider regional economy for most of the period after the Mongol invasions. One of the most immediate consequences of the Mongol invasions on Iraq was the massive abandonment of the countryside by peasants and the deterioration of the water infrastructures.24 The Mongol hegemony increasingly led to a political fragmentation and regionalization in Iraq, resulting in a visible slackening of the commercial ties between Mosul and Baghdad, and consequently, the large demand of Baghdad for the grain of Mosul came to a halt due to population decline.25Although the Ilkhanate branch of the Mongol 23 24 25 In terms of religious architecture, Mosul had a rich landscape that held many mosques, social complexes, masjids, shrines, and monasteries together. With the exception of monasteries, the waqf revenues of all religious buildings were given in the tax-registers, which were mostly derived from the urban rents and miscellaneous production units of rural areas, such as villages, nomadic groups; arable fields, vineyards, and dye-houses. See Gündüz, Osmanlı İdaresinde Musul: 370–390. In the same way, there is no record of watermill in the khāss revenues, which were separated for the imperial family and provincial governors. Ibid.: 321–336. In contrast to Mosul, on the other hand, it is possible to observe in other regions, for example Mardin and Ayıntab, that watermills were listed among the revenue items for many religious endowments. Those endowments in Mardin were established during the 12th and 15th centuries by the royal family members from the Artuklu and Aqqoyunlu dynasties to financially support the madrasah and masjids. Alpay Bizbirlik, 16. Yüzyıl Ortalarında Diyarbekir Beylerbeyliği’nde Vakıflar (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2002): 304 (the Madrasah of Kasım Padişah), 308 (the Madrasah of Melik Nâsır-ı Şehid) and 315 (the Madrasah of Sultan Hatun). The watermills were included also in the endowments of the Ottoman state elites, for example the second governor-general of Diyarbekir, Hüsrev Pasha established an endowment for the mosque bearing his own name, which contained the rental income of two watermills among the other revenue items. Ibid.: 33. For Ayıntab, see Hüseyin Özdeğer, Onaltıncı Asırda Ayıntâb Livâsı (İstanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Rektörlük, İktisat Fakültesi, Türk İktisat ve İçtimaiyat Tarihi Araştırmaları Merkezi, 1998): 181. Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages: 251–253. Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam 2 (The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods) (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1977): 388–390. During the Umayyad and Abbasid periods, Mosul played the role of granary that fed Kufa, Basra and Baghdad, the flourishing cities of southern Mesopotamia and intensively continued its leading role in agricultural production in the later periods thanks to the state-led agrarian policies of the Zangi and Ayyubid dynasties. Chase F. Robinson, Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest: The Transformation of Northern Mesopotamia JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 248 Usta and Tonghini Empire inaugurated a new period of political and economic stability, including restoration of the irrigation infrastructure in rural Mosul, this had only a had short-lived effect.26 The fall of the Ilkhanate rule created a political vacuum and regional instability in Iraq and Iran, which stirred up the provincial noble families to challenge one another for territorial supremacy.27 After the Timurid Empire engulfed large parts of the Near East, including Iraq, in the early 15th century, Mosul found itself once again in the grip of political fragmentation and faced relentless competition between the nomadic chieftains of the Turcoman States for the rest of the century.28 It is probable that political unrest and heavy taxes and exactions caused dispersion of the rural population and consequently delayed the long-term investment in water infrastructures in Mosul and its hinterland in this period.29 In the event of a deteriorated irrigation system, the best option for the remaining population to earn a living and retain their ability to pay taxes was to switch to an economy oriented around natural conditions in which rain-fed cultivation was combined with stock breeding.30 In contrast to Iraq, where the nomadic rulers were indifferent to the improvement of agricultural production, the Mamluk rulers and military elites in the regions of Bilād al-Shām were at pains to take control of the management and organization of agriculture and the water infrastructure, including watermills. Despite the recurrent bubonic plagues and economic setbacks, the Mamluks persisted with an aggressive policy of economic interventionism, which led them to monopolize the grain and sugar productions and markets.31 Therefore, 26 27 28 29 30 31 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 85–86. Hugh Kennedy, “The Feeding of the Five Hundred Thousand: Cities and Agriculture in Early Islamic Mesopotamia.” Iraq 73 (2011): 189–190. The rule of the Ilkhanate Mongols changed the economic trajectory of Iraq from Mediterranean to Persia in the first half of the 14th century. Abdullah, A Short History of Iraq: 34–35. Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages: 260. Sluglett and Currie, Atlas of Islamic History: 44. For an overview of the political history of Iraq between the Mongol invasion in 1258 and the Ottoman Rule in 1534, see Abdullah, A Short History of Iraq: 38–41. Al-Feel, The Historical Geography of Iraq: 41–48. Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages: 268–274. Abdullah, A Short History of Iraq: 40–41. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam 2: 390–391. Tony J. Wilkinson, “Water and Human Settlement in the Balikh Valley, Syria: Investigations from 1992–1995.” Journal of Field Archaeology 25/1 (Spring, 1998): 84. Ira M. Lapidus, “The Grain Economy of Mamluk Egypt.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 12–1 (1969): 1–15. E. Ashtor, “The Wheat Supply of the Mamluk Kingdom.” In East-West Trade in the Mediterranean, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986): 293–94. The Mamluk regime inherited the tradition of state monopolies on grain and various goods from the Fatimids in Egypt. See, Rabie Hassanein, JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 249 an institutionalized ownership of the watermills gained utmost importance for long-term sustainability of the grain and sugar trade and production under the control of the state elites in Bilād al-Shām.32 Steven McPhillips shows that not only the religious institutions of Muslims and Christians, but also the Ottoman state elites owned several watermills under the management of their waqf in Lebanon and Syria, former Mamluk lands, in the 16th century.33 The differences between Mosul and Bilād al-Shām appear to indicate that when the Arab lands were conquered, largely by the mid-16th century, the Ottoman administration inherited diverse regional trends in the management of water infrastructure.34 In Bilād al-Shām, the gristmills and sugar mills enjoyed a fairly long period of economic stability and received regular maintenance under the patronage of religious endowments and the intervention of state elites because their regions were economically integrated into the Mediterranean with the exportation of grain, sugar, and textiles.35 32 33 34 35 The Financial System of Egypt A.H. 564–741/A.D. 1169–1341 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972): 92. For the economic interventions of the Mamluk elites on wheat, see John L. Meloy, “Economic Intervention and the Political Economy of the Mamluk State under al-Ashraf Barsbāy.” Mamluk Studies Review IX/2 (2005): 89–90. For the waqf investments of the Mamluk sultans in southern Bilad-al Sham, see also Bethany J. Walker, “Sowing the Seeds of Rural Decline?: Agriculture as an Economic Barometer for Late Mamluk Jordan.” Mamluk Studies Review XI-1 (2007): 181. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony the World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989): 213, 230–31. Schriwer, Water and Technology in Levantine Society: 87. Stephen McPhillips, “Harnessing Hydraulic Power in Ottoman Syria.” In Landscapes of the Islamic World (Archaeology, History and Ethnography), eds. Stephen McPhillips and Paul D. Wordsworth (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016): 156. Idem. and et al., “The Jawz Valley. Reconstruction an Ottoman ‘waterscape’ in Mount Lebanon,” Levant 51–2 (2019): 209. For a comparative perspective on the social and political characteristics of the Arab lands taken over by the Ottoman rule, see Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, 2nd edition (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2002): 294–98. Lapidus states that certain features of the Ottoman State bore great similarities with the Middle Eastern state formations, such as the slave recruitments into army and palace, a quasi-feudal organization, patronage of the religious leaders, supports for agriculture and trade. However, the Ottoman State also carried certain features that were more associated the Byzantine Empire, such as patronage of the Christian churches, the guild system, and controls over the provincial economy. Ibid., 258. For a general assessment over the impact of the Ottoman rule on the Arab lands, see also Jane Hathaway, The Arab Lands Under Ottoman Rule, 1516–1800 (London & New York: Routledge, 2008): 228–34. However, no scholar has attempted to compare and contrast between the Ottoman State and its Middle Eastern antecedents in dealing with the issues regarding water-resource management and water infrastructures. Lughod, Before the European Economy: 230–36. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 250 Usta and Tonghini The watermills in Mosul, unlike their counterparts in Bilād al-Shām, were of little economic value and therefore deprived of patronage and attention on the part of the state elites and religious institutions in the pre-Ottoman medieval period. The primary role of the watermills in the rural landscape of Mosul was simply to grind grain, given that there was no sugarcane cultivation. Also, the grain was produced in Mosul to meet local consumption instead of being dispatched to the markets of other cities, therefore Mosul relied on a relatively fewer watermills to obtain the ground grain. Before Ottoman rule, the political and economic environment surrounding Mosul scarcely favored the expansion of grain cultivation, because the Ilkhanids had already cut Mosul off from its connection with Syria and the Mediterranean, and then turned Mosul together with northern Mesopotamia toward Persia, which under Seljukid and Mongol rule had long been largely nomadized. After the Ilkhanids, Mosul was economically and administratively oriented toward eastern Anatolia where numerous nomadic tribes held the power under the banner of the Aqqoyunlu confederation in the 15th century.36 However, with the establishment of Ottoman rule Mosul gradually entered the economic and administrative orbit of Baghdad, thereby becoming well-positioned to export its surplus grain to southern Mesopotamia and Baghdad.37 Undoubtedly, the economic integration of Mosul with Baghdad, based mainly on ground grain exports, spurred the construction of new watermills and the renovation of dilapidated mills in the 16th century. Although our documentation does not indicate exactly who carried out such hydraulic works in the early period of Ottoman rule in Mosul, it is likely that the small farmer groups and peasants took the leading role in the development of water infrastructure in the absence of state intervention and institutional patronage. 4 Watermills in the ‘Land behind Mosul’: An Archaeological Perspective In the last decade, renewed interest in archaeological research in northern Mesopotamia has led to the acquisition of new data related to its history, specifically the settlement dynamics, land use, resource management and material culture. Field-work has consisted primarily of landscape archaeology programmes covering wide areas of present-day Iraqi Kurdistan, while 36 37 Abdullah, A Short History of Iraq: 34–5, 53. Ibid.: 50–1. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 251 excavation projects on specific sites have remained rather limited.38 The Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project (LoNAP), a wide-ranging multidisciplinary research program based on archaeological surveys, became operational in 2012: it aims at studying the formation and evolution of the cultural and natural landscape of a vast area in the hinterland of Mosul from the Paleolithic to the Islamic period.39 This area covers a surface of 3000 sq. km on the eastern bank of the River Tigris, between the provinces of Ninawa (al-Mawsil) and Dohuk, with the Zagros piedmont to the north, upland plains to the west and valley-floor plains to the south and south-east. The area is watered by tributaries of the Tigris (Rubar Dohuk, the Bandawai Stream, Rubar Dashqalan, and the River Khosr) and of the Upper Zab (Gomel and Al-Khazir rivers) and, with its mean annual rainfall of 450–600 mm (300–450 mm in drought years), allows dry-farming agriculture (Fig. 1). Developed within the framework of LoNAP is a specific research project entitled Land behind Mosul: settlement, landscape and material culture of the Islamic period in Northern Iraq, which is devoted to region’s history during the long Islamic period, from the Arab conquest of the 7th century to the end of the Ottoman period in the early 20th century. This project attempts to integrate the archaeological findings gathered in the LoNAP survey with the documentation derived from the study of the written sources in order to reconstruct the history of settlement, land use and resource management in the area.40 This approach suffers from certain basic limitations: one is that outside major centers, the association between the settlements of the rural landscape intercepted by archaeology and the villages mentioned in the texts remains largely hypothetical; in addition, the dating tools developed by archaeology only 38 39 40 For an overview of recent activities see Kopanias, Kostantinos and John MacGinnis (eds.), The Archaeology of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Adjacent Regions (Oxford 2016: Archaeopress). Bonacossi and Iamoni, “Landscape and Settlement in the Eastern Upper Iraqi Tigris and Navkur Plains”: 9–39. Bonacossi, “Funerary Landscapes in the Land of Nineveh: Tracking Mobile Pastoralists in the Transtigridian Piedmont of Northern Iraq.” In New Agendas in Remote Sensing and Landscape Archaeology in the Near East. Studies in honour of Tony J. Wilkinson, eds. Dan Lawrence, Mark Altaweel and Graham Philip (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2020): 41–62. For a full list of publications from LoNAP http://www.terradi ninive.com/abstracts/?lang=en. A survey of the written documentation provided by Syriac, Arabic, Persian and Ottoman sources was carried out by V. Berti, S. Cristoforetti, M. Melčák, and Onur Usta. It will appear in the final publication of the results of the project, currently in preparation: Daniele Morandi Bonacossi and Cristina Tonghini (eds.). forthcoming. Heartland of Empires. Settlement and Land Use in the Eastern Tigris Plains of Northern Iraq from the Hellenistic to the Ottoman Period (IAMKRI 2). JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 252 figure 1 Usta and Tonghini General map of the LoNAP survey area (A. Savioli) allow a settlement framework to be recomposed in terms of macro-periods, and account little for significant variations within them. It is well known that archaeology dealing with the Islamic period in the region has remained a marginal field of research alongside the mainstream subjects in archaeological research until very recently, and documentary series of reference purposes are only now slowly being established in very broad terms.41 More specifically, archaeological surveys, given the lack of a detailed chrono-typology of reference for ceramic finds, can only assess settlements in very broad spans of time: the Early Islamic Period (7th–10th centuries), the Middle Islamic Period (11th–15th centuries), the Late Islamic Period (16th–20th centuries). It is clear that with such approximate diagnostic tools it is not possible to grasp the fluctuations of settlement within these broad time frames, or to distinguish the periods of contraction and abandonment they may contain (Fig. 2). 41 Cristina Tonghini and Valentina Vezzoli, “The Islamic Period Settlement in Iraqi Kurdistan: Results from the Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project.” In Proceedings of the 11th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East vol. 2. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2020): 483–486. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period figure 2 253 LoNAP survey, settlement distribution map: sites attributed to the Islamic period and watermills (A. Savioli) More specifically, the long Ottoman period has only very recently been taken into account by archaeological research; knowledge of its material culture is extremely fragmentary, especially in rural contexts.42 Thus, the results of the reconnaissance work in the project, based on surface finds, could only attribute 63 of the 396 sites of the Islamic period to the Late Islamic Period; a few of the 93 sites currently ascribed to an ‘Unspecified Islamic period’ could therefore belong to this time frame.43 Furthermore, it is worth noting that our diagnostic tools do not currently allow us to detect variations within the long Ottoman period, and to distinguish, for example, 16th-century settlements from 19th-century ones. 42 43 Baram, Uzi and Lynda Carroll (eds.), A Historical archaeology of the Ottoman Empire. Breaking New Ground (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2000). Stephen McPhillips and Paul D. Wordsworth (eds.), Landscapes of the Islamic world (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). St John Simpson, “Analysing the recent past: the archaeology of death, pastoralism, pots and pipes in the Ottoman Jazira and beyond.” Al-Rafidan 32 (2011): 1–47. Bethany J. Walker, “Ottoman Archaeology: Localizing the Imperial.” Encyclopaedia of Global Archaeology. (New York: Springer, 2014). Tonghini and Vezzoli, “The Islamic Period Settlement in Iraqi Kurdistan”. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 254 Usta and Tonghini Further archaeological work will hopefully contribute to our knowledge of the Ottoman period and its material culture.44 Encouraging results are already appearing from the study of the remains of the watermills identified in the project. These remains pertain to the horizontal-wheeled type of watermill that is widespread wherever water streams have low volumes; the variety identified in the Mosul hinterland corresponds to a Near Eastern/Mediterranean/Levantine type that has been studied in present-day Jordan, Lebanon, Cyprus and Iran.45 Watermills constitute evidence relating to the productive network of Mosul and the ability of the ruling class to manage resources and infrastructures. However, it remains very difficult to assign the various structures identified so far to a specific chronological time frame. In general, no finds have been detected on the surface of the milling complexes, probably because they did not serve a residential function, at least until very recent times.46 Moreover, there are presently no elements that associate milling sites firmly with specific settlements, and this remains a matter of hypothesis. The part of the watermill that generally survives is the drop-tower, which is more rigorously constructed than the rest of the milling complex in order to withstand water pressure. No parts of the grinding devices, such as millstones or the wheel itself, have survived in the mills surveyed so far.47 A typological approach based on masonry features has characterized the study of the watermill remains identified in the project. The stratigraphic study and excavation 44 45 46 47 A joint archaeological research project has recently been launched by the universities of Milan, Pisa, Turin, Udine and Venice: Near Eastern Empires at Work. An archaeological approach to the study of the organization of empires and their impact on local societies and landscapes in Iraq. A specific line of research will focus on the Ottoman period to investigate, on an archaeological basis, the local response to Ottoman imperial policy in terms of settlement dynamics, agricultural development and the creation of infrastructure. Harverson, “Watermills in Iran”: 149–177. Mark Gardiner and Alison McQuitty, “A watermill in Wadi el Arab, north Jordan and watermill development.” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 119/1 (1987): 24–32. Joseph A. Greene, “The watermills of the ʿAjlun-Kufranja valley: The relationship of technology, society and settlement.” Studies in the history and archaeology of Jordan 5 (1995): 757–765. McPhillips et al, “The Jawz Valley. Reconstruction an Ottoman ‘waterscape’ in Mount Lebanon”: 202–218. McQuitty, “Watermills in Jordan: technology, typology, dating and development”: 745–751. Idem, “Harnessing the Power of Water: Watermills in Jordan.” In Men of Dikes and Canals. The Archaeology of Water in the Middle East (Orient-Archäologie 13), eds. Hans-Dieter Bienert and Jutta Häser (Rahden: Marie Leidorf, 2004): 261–272. Neely, “Sasanian period drop-tower gristmills on the Deh Luran Plain”: 232–254. Schriwer, Water and Technology in Levantine Society. Harverson, “Watermills in Iran”: 115. The excavations at site no. 124 identified the leverage beam of Period 4 still in situ (Fig. 5); a stone socket for the wheel was found in secondary deposition. See Cristina Tonghini and Onur Usta, “Mesopotamian Waterscapes”: 98, 112. Figs. 27–29. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 255 of a group of mills in Wadi Bandawai, site no. 124 (Fig. 2), made it possible to organize this typology along a chronological sequence. The milling complex at site no. 124 is located on a gentle slope overlooking the wadi, and comprises two-mill houses placed in a chain, one upstream, powered by two drop-towers (Building Unit 1–2), and the other downstream, powered by three drop-towers (Building Unit 3–5) (Fig. 3). The earliest element of the figure 3 General map of site no. 124, with the two groups of mills (E. Reali, L. Tarducci) JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 25� Usta and Tonghini sequence is drop-tower BU1, firmly dated to the 7th–8th century on the basis of radiocarbon dating of the mortar (Period 1); the masonry typology suggests that drop-towers BU4 and BU5 were built within a close chronological time frame. The latest period of the sequence (Period 4) can be dated to the late 19th–early 20th centuries on the basis of the finds retrieved through excavation. In this period drop-tower BU1 had resumed its activity, and an upper level was added to the mill house, very likely for residential purposes. The other two periods, Period 2 and Period 3, can only be assigned to a hypothetical time frame. In Period 2 one or two further drop-towers (BU2 and perhaps also BU3) were added to the complex. In Period 3 the whole complex was renovated, the drop-towers restored and the two mill houses completely rebuilt. Period 2 may correspond to the Middle Islamic Period and reflect the increase of settlement and the general prosperity of the area in the decades that preceded the Mongol disruption of the mid-13th century (Figs. 4–5).48 figure 4 48 Drop-towers BU1 and BU2 (left) and their millhouse, from the south-west (photo L. Tarducci) Tonghini and Vezzoli, “The Islamic Period Settlement in Iraqi Kurdistan”: 487–488; Tonghini and Usta, “Mesopotamian Waterscapes”: 114. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period figure 5 257 Canal of drop-tower BU1, with leverage beam in situ (photo C. Tonghini) Because the massive reconstruction of Period 3 clearly occurs after a period of disruption and abandonment, and in consideration of the fact that the building technique of Period 3 differs significantly from previous periods, it has been suggested that this may relate to the major phase of restoration of JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 258 Usta and Tonghini milling installations that the sources ascribe to the second half of the 16th and 17th centuries, after a long period of abandonment. Evidence for the ruinous state of milling installations in the 16th century is clearly reported in the written sources: in the 1540 tax-register, two of the four mills of Wadi Bandawai are reported to be in ruins, but they were renovated by 1558.49 By this time, Wadi Bandawai seems to have become the milling center of the area for the rural agricultural as well as the nomadic population. Although it is not possible to associate the data from the written sources with a specific mill site, archaeology confirms this change: eight mill sites have been identified in the area of Wadi Bandawai; two of them show a renovation phase very similar to that described at site no. 124 for Period 3, therefore, three of the surviving milling complexes (no. 124 and two mentioned above) underwent massive restoration before resuming activity. Some of the Wadi Bandawai mills may have continued in operation in the 17th and 18th centuries, but there is no evidence from site no. 124 to support this inference. On the contrary, the phase of renovation that the written sources describe as affecting some of the mills of Wadi Bandawai in the second half of the 19th century matches the evidence that emerged from the excavations of site no. 124 in Period 4.50 Archaeology adds some extra information: the mill house acquires a residential function in this last phase (Period 4: Fig. 4). In spite of the limitations discussed above, the archaeological documentation yields some interesting patterns. First of all, it testifies to a continuity in the location of milling installations, in spite of the fact that settlement distributions varied in this long span of time: for example, 39 of the 63 sites so far ascribed to the Late Islamic Period were not occupied in the previous Middle Islamic Period.51 Secondly, it confirms the continuous re-use of its main element, the drop-tower, from its foundation in the 7th–8th century, to its abandonment in the early 20th century, implying that no major technological changes occurred for centuries in the rural landscape as far as the processing of cereals is concerned. Hopefully, future field work will provide more accurate dating for the mills identified so far; in fact, a campaign to collect samples of mortar for radiocarbon dating was carried out in October 2021, and the results will be available 49 50 51 Ibid.: 112–115. Ibid.: 118. Tonghini and Vezzoli, “The Islamic Period Settlement in Iraqi Kurdistan”: 488–489. These figures are preliminary, since the final data are being processed to appear in Morandi Bonacossi and Cristina Tonghini, forthcoming. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 259 in the near future. A better knowledge of the production, transport and distribution network achieved by merging data from archaeological and historical research may lead to an accurate understanding of the crucially relationship between milling installations and the settlements they serve. This will enable a fuller exploitation of the archaeological documentation in reconstructing the history of the rural landscape of Mosul. 5 A Survey of the Tax-Registers Concerning the Watermills in the 16th Century The previous section has shown that archaeology provides more concrete evidence for the identification of mill sites than do written sources. In this regard, it is impossible to determine whether a mill site unrevealed by an archaeological survey exactly corresponds to the one cited in written sources. In Wadi Bandawai, for example, although eight mill installations have been recently discovered by the archaeological surveys of LoNAP, the tax-registers show the existence of only four watermills in the 16th century. Besides, the tax-registers do not provide any geographic indication that could help us to locate the mill installations, but instead they associate the mills with the nearest settlement as a source of taxation. In some cases, although the watermills are generally identified by the names of their owners in the tax-registers of other regions, such an identification provides nothing about the location, considering the constant demographic and residential changes in the long term. Also, there is no likelihood of encountering the name of any mill owner in the tax-registers of Mosul. In the Ottoman tax-registers, mills were generally classified into three types according to the source of energy used to power them; watermills (asiyab and sel değirmeni), windmills (bad), and animal-driven mills (ding).52 The mills powered by water were all defined as asiyab, but only some of them were classified as sel ,perhaps these were the ones that obtained the water straight from a river and therefore could operate only when sufficient water filled the river bed.53 Animal-driven mills were used generally to husk rice, or to extract 52 53 Salih Aynural, İstanbul Değirmenleri ve Fırınları-Zahire Ticareti (1740–1840) (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2001): 85. Emecen, XVI. Asırda Manisa Kazâsı: 259; Mübahat S. Kütükoğlu, XVI. Asırda Çeşme Kazasının Sosyal ve İktisâdî Yapısı (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2010): 136. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 2�0 Usta and Tonghini sesame and olive oil.54 There were also mills processing rice, sesame and olive that were powered by water.55 In the tax-registers of Mosul, the watermills are defined as asiyab and divided into two categories as tam-sale and nim-sale according to the duration of their operation in a year. While the tam-sale watermills operated uninterruptedly for a whole year, the others (nim-sale) operated for half a year. Millers were required to pay a mill tax of 60 akçe (a basic monetary unit based on silver coin)56 for the tam-sale mills, and 30 akçe for the nim-sale mills; that is to say millers were required to pay 5 akçe for every month that the mill operated. The tam-sale mills increased in number from 24 in 1540 to 34 in 1558 and then 36 in 1575, whereas the number of nim-sale mills was three in 1540 and remained steady in 1558 and 1575. The watermills recorded in the tax-registers seem to have been sufficient to meet the demand for grinding wheat into flour, given that the number of the tam-sale watermills grew at a faster rate than the total wheat harvest. While the increase rate was 50 percent for the tam-sale watermills, the total wheat harvest rose by 38.5 percent from 237,345 kile in 1540 to 328,910 kile in 1575.57 Despite this, if the other types of grain that are suitable to be processed into flour, such as barley and millet, were to be taken into the calculation, the watermills recorded in the tax-registers would barely have been sufficient to meet the demand for ground grain. Nevertheless, the figures about the number of watermills must be interpreted with caution because there were possibly more watermills in the rural landscape of Mosul than the relevant tax-registers indicate. The mills that were installed in a landscape for the first time were not officially inserted into the tax-registers, because the Ottoman fiscal rules stipulated that the tax revenues of the newly-built watermills would be allocated immediately to the state treasury, not the fief-holders, whose revenue was shown only in the tax-registers.58 54 55 56 57 58 Emecen, XVI. Asırda Manisa Kazâsı: 260. Gökçe, XVI. ve XVII. Yüzyıllarda Lâzıkıyye: 383. One akçe contained 0.73 gr silver in 1550 and 0.68 in between 1568 and 1582. Şevket Pamuk, “Part V Money in the Ottoman Empire, 1326–1914.” In An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire (volume two 1600–1914), eds. Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert (New York: Cambridge University Press,1994): 955. Gündüz, Osmanlı İdaresinde Musul: 261. Kile was an Ottoman grain measure used for wheat, barley and rice. Although its weight capacity showed regional variations, the Istanbul standard of 25,656 kg can be taken as the general figure, if the regional data is not given in the tax-register series. Walter Hinz, Islamische Masse und Gewichte (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1955): 41. This legal regulation regarding the mills was formulated in the codification of Ottoman law in the 16th century. H. Necâti Demirtaş, Açıklamalı Osmanlı Fetvâları IV-Fetâvâ-yı JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 2�1 It would therefore be plausible to consider the watermills that appeared in the tax-registers of Mosul as already-existing mill installations, standing either in working condition or in ruins. The fact that more mill installations are found in archaeological surveys than in the archival documents, as seen via the case of Mosul in the previous section, can be explained to some extent by this nuance of the tax-registers regarding watermills. Although the number of watermills increased by 50 percent from 1540 to 1575, the number of the villages that contained at least one watermill increased by 27 percent, from 11 in 1540 to 14 in 1575 (Table 1). It is clear that the watermills tended to concentrate in the villages where the irrigation infrastructure was capable of sustaining more watermills rather than being distributed in settlements that had poor access to irrigation facilities, where they could serve no purpose. Besides, the total number of villages that appeared with at least one watermill in three of the tax-registers was 16 and only two of them contained one watermill for the first time by 1575. Clearly, then, the distribution of the watermills among the settlements was not accidental, and the establishment of watermills in or near the settlements equipped with water channels and dams was a conscious decision. Given the need for a continuous flow of water to run the watermills, the tam-sale mills must have had access to a perennial irrigation network even in the arid summer, whereas the nim-sale mills derived water from the riverbeds and therefore remained idle when the river ceased to flow during the summer months. The existence of an effective irrigation system in the hinterland of Mosul is also evident from the fact that the tam-sale mills outnumbered the nim-sale ones, as is reflected in the tax-registers. This may indicate that the villagers of Ottoman Mosul developed a network of water canals by their own efforts to irrigate their fields and supply water to the mills. Here, the evidence from the tax-registers as outlined below shows that the watermills were distributed over Ebüssu’ûd Fâtih Nüshası (İstanbul: Kubbealtı, 2020): 947–948. “If a mill was established in a fief land (timar) and was built on the site of an old mill installation but was not registered with the fief-holder, its tax-revenues would be allocated to the fief-holder. However, if the mill had been built for the first time and not on an old installation, its revenues were collected by the mevkufatçı who recorded income from properties which were temporarily in the possession of the treasury until they were registered to the fief-holder.” This passage is translated from Celâl-zâde Kanunnâmesi in Ahmed Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnâmeleri ve Hukukî Tahlilleri 7. Kitap/1. Kısım Kanunî Devri Kanunnâmeleri (IV) 7/II. Kitap II. Selim Devri Kanunnâmeleri (İstanbul: Osmanlı Araştırmaları Vakfı,1994): 233. For the role of mevkufatçı, see Linda T. Darling, Revenue Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560–1660 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1986): 65. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 2�2 Usta and Tonghini Table 1 The number of watermills in the mid-16th century hinterland of Mosul in three separate years, noting the taxes paid in each instancea Villages 1540 1558 1575 Tam Nim Tax Tam Nim Tax Tam Nim Tax sale sale akçe sale sale akçe sale sale akçe Koyuncuk (Kuyunjık) Mehlebi (Muhallabiyāh) Khorsabad (Dar-Şarrukîn) Ömeri (Omar Qapchi) Bağdere (Baʾādre) Bahinduva (Bandawai) Bashiqa Bahizan (Bahzani) Cerahi (Jarrahiyāh) Girmavi (Girmawah) ʿAin-Sifni (Sheikhan) Meshrefi (Sharafiyā?) Necmi (Najmok) Aktaş Bakak Kaim (Al-Qaim) Total 2 1 3 3 2 2 3 3 1 1 3 – – – – – 24 – – 3 – – – – – – – – – – – – – 3 120 – 60 – 270 3 180 5 120 2 120 4 180 3 180 3 60 1 60 2 180 6 – 3 – 1 – 1 – – – – 1590 34 – – 3 – – – – – – – – – – – – – 3 – – 270 300 120 240 180 180 60 120 360 180 60 60 – – 3 5 2 4 3 3 1 2 6 3 1 1 – 1 – 1 2130 36 – – 3 – – – – – – – – – – – – – 3 – – 270 300 120 240 180 180 60 120 360 180 60 60 60 60 2250 a This table was compiled from data on mills provided by the study of Ahmet Gündüz on the Ottoman land-registers of Mosul. Some of the village names are corrected in this paper and the modern names of the villages are given in bracket. Ahmet Gündüz, Osmanlı İdaresinde Musul: 300. the settlements located in the river basins where the ancient Assyrians had built channels and dams. One area where the watermills were consolidated was the foothills of Mount Bashiqa stretching down to the River Khosr. Khorsabad (known as Dar-Şarrukîn today), the ancient military headquarters of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, appears in the registers of 1540, 1558, and 1575 to have contained six watermills, half of which were recorded as nim-sale and the other half tam-sale.59 It is likely 59 TT. d. no. 195, p. 73. TT. d. no. 308, p. 76. TT. d. no. 660, p. 66. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 2�3 that water was supplied to the three tam-sale watermills from conduits connected to an irrigation system. The other three watermills defined as nim-sale are likely to have been installed on the riverbed of the River Khosr. Another village that contained watermills was located five km southeast of Khorsabad, and was called Ömeri (Omar Qapchi). An improvement in irrigation system is shown by the fact that the number of tam-sale watermills in Ömeri increased from three to five in 1540–1575.60 The other milling area included two neighboring villages, Bahizan61 and Bashiqa,62 in proximity to Ömeri. Both villages were registered with six watermills described as tam-sale.63 The springs on the foothills of Mount Bashiqa may have provided a sufficient flow of water running through conduits connected to the watermills.64 The other congregation of the watermills operated on the piedmont plain of the Zagros Mountains, northeast of Mosul; all of them were defined as tam-sale and had year-round access to water. In 1558–1575, the village of Ain-Sifni (Sheikhan) had the largest number of watermills, with six,65 while Bahinduva came in second place with four watermills.66 Bahinduva was followed by the villages of Bağdere (Baʾādre),67 Girmavi (Girmawah),68 Meshrefi (Sharafiya?)69 and Cerahi (Jarahiyāh) with one mill each.70 Similar to Bahizan and Bashiqa cited above, the consolidation of full-year operated watermills in this area was doubtless enabled by the conduits that obtained water from the streams and springs on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. Some of the watermills appear to have already disappeared in the taxregisters by the end of the 16th century, but the reason for their disappearance remains unclear. The village of Koyuncuk (Kuyunjık), on the mound of ancient Nineveh, appears in the 1575 register no longer to have had its two watermills in operation.71 It was the same in the village of Mehlebi (Muhallabiyāh),72 on 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 TT. d. no. 195, p. 78.TT. d. no. 308, p. 117. TT. d. no. 660, p. 153. TT. d. no. 195, p. 41. TT. d. no. 308, p. 81. TT. d. no. 660, p. 134. TT. d. no. 195, p. 91. TT. d. no. 308, p. 124. TT. d. no. 660, p. 158. For Bahizan, the watermills can be seen in TT. d. no. 195, p. 41. TT. d. no. 308, p. 81. TT. d. no. 660, p. 134. For Bashiqa, see TT. d. no. 195, p. 91; TT. d. no. 308, p. 124. TT. d. no. 660, p. 158. Ur, “Sennacherib’s Northern Assyrian Canals”: 324. TT. d. no. 195, p. 132; TT. d. no. 308, p. 57; TT. d. no. 660, p. 79. TT. d. no. 195, p. 79; TT. d. no. 308, p. 119; TT. d. no. 660, p. 141. TT. d. no. 195, p. 79.TT. d. no. 308, p. 114. TT. d. no. 660, p. 134. TT. d. no. 195, p. 132. TT. d. no. 308, p. 58. TT. d. no. 660, p. 80. TT. d. no. 308, p. 131. TT. d. no. 660, p. 161. TT. d. no. 195, p. 93.TT. d. no. 308, p. 75. TT. d. no. 660, p. 66. TT. d. no. 195, p. 56. TT. d. no. 660, p. 70. TT. d. no. 195, p. 71 TT. d. no. 308, p. 115.TT. d. no. 660, p. 146. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 2�4 Usta and Tonghini the western bank of the Tigris. On the other hand, by 1575, four new tam-sale watermills started to operate in four different villages. One of the villages was named Necmi (Najmok)73 and the other was Kaim (Al-Qaim).74 Both were within the valley of the River Khosr; the location of the other two villages (Aktaş75 and Bakak76), meanwhile, is unidentified. Some of the mills were grouped according to their ownership status in the tax-registers with the term of asiyab-ı khāssa that referred to cases in which mills were allotted as a private domain to a servant of the state holding a fief.77 Mills in this classification, for example in the village of ʿAin-Sifni, were not recorded in numbers, but their annual tax-revenues were given in the register instead. In parallel with the general upward trend in the number of mills, nevertheless, more active mills defined as khāssa seem to have come into use by 1575, given that their revenues from grain grinding fee rose from 2,000 to 4,000 akçe in 1540–1575.78 Interestingly, the record of asiyab-ı khāssa was given (without specifying the number and revenue) for the village of Keremlis, where there was no watermill registered in either the tam-sale or nim-sale categories in the tax-registers.79 On the other hand, the fact that the mills classified as asiyab-ı khāssa do not appear frequently in the tax-registers may be related to the considerable significance of Mosul as a grain producing region in the eyes of the Ottoman government. Halil İnalcık points out that the Ottoman administration tended to abolish the status of private domain for watermills in some parts of the Balkan provinces and instead assigned them to ownership of the reaya (tax-paying class of Ottoman Empire), as the watermills were poorly tended when in the possession of fief-holders.80 It is probable that the fief-holders were far-removed from the village life and economy during their military service were unable to care for the maintenance of their own watermills.81 Therefore, the Ottoman administration tended to leave the provi73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 TT. d. no. 195, p. 51.TT. d. no. 308, p. 56; TT. d. no. 660, p. 65. TT. d. no. 195, p. 83.TT. d. no. 308, p. 134; TT. d. no. 660, p. 143. TT. d. no. 308, p. 59.TT. d. no. 660, p. 81. TT. d. no. 660, p. 143. Emecen, XVI. Asırda Manisa Kazâsı: 260. TT. d. no. 308, p. 57. TT. d. no. 660, p. 79. TT. d. no. 195, p. 65. TT. d. no. 308, p. 42.TT. d. no. 660, p. 126. Halil İnalcık, Hicrî 835 Tarihli Sûret-i Defter-i Sancak-i Arvanid, 2nd edition (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1987): 31. It is seen in the tax-registers of Manisa that several watermills in the category of khāssa remained ruined. Emecen, XVI. Asırda Manisa Kazâsı: 260. A similar situation can be found in the tax-registers of Kirkuk and Arbil, the neighboring regions of Mosul. For example, a postscript in the tax-register of Arbil indicates the poor management of a watermill by the fief-holders. The postscript states that a watermill worth 1500 akçe in Arbil was JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 2�5 sion of grinding facilities to the reaya so that there would be no disruption in processing grain into flour. 6 Water Infrastructure of Mosul in Turkish Cosmography While it is now well established that the year-round operation of watermills demonstrated the effectiveness of a long-term irrigation system, very little is currently known about the construction methods and techniques used for irrigation infrastructure in Ottoman Mosul. It is probable that the villagers of Mosul under Ottoman administration followed conventional procedure more or less similar to the ancient models for installing an irrigation system, because the basic principle of an irrigation system was universal, namely to obtain the water from streams and springs and then diverted to the fields and settlements outside the valley plain. The ancient Assyrians expanded the openings of the springs on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains to establish reservoirs where water was then diverted into a canal and ran down to the settlements. The canals, like Khinis and Faida, were designed to trap the water streams that ran down the surface of slopes. The Assyrians dredged the river beds to canalize them in order to ensure a steady flow of water for most of the year, as is observed in certain stretches of the River Khosr. Furthermore, they also collected the water from a stretch of the River Khosr in a dam and diverted the water into the Kisiri canal, which reached the city of Nineveh, running parallel to the river.82 It is possible that the later inhabitants of rural Mosul either used the extant network of irrigation by renovating parts of it when necessary, or else they drew upon this network for the construction of additional canals and weirs. No matter what they did, the small farmer groups and peasants were able to 82 recorded as asiyab-ı hassa in the possession of Zeynel Beğ. It was passed onto his son Yakub Beğ upon his death, but Yakub neglected the watermill for a long time because of doing military service in the Balkans. His watermill was then expropriated by the state treasury to be farmed out to a person from the reaya class from Arbil. M. Mehdi İlhan, “Erbil Vilayeti Mufassal ve Mücmel Tahrir Defteri (H. 949/M. 1542).” Belgeler—Türk Tarihi Belgeleri Dergisi, 16–20 (1994–1995): 121/69a. Likewise, there is also plenty of postscripts in the tax-register of Kirkuk showing that the watermills recorded as asiyab-ı hassa lay in ruins (harab). Yusuf Sarınay and et al, 111 Numaralı Kerkük Livâsı Mufassal Tahrîr Defteri (Ankara: Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 2003): 105–106/50b. Bonacossi, “The Water for Nineveh”: 91–2. Bonacossi and Iamoni, “Landscape and Settlement in the Eastern Upper Iraqi Tigris”: 26–8. Ur, “Sennacherib’s Northern Assyrian Canals:”: 320–29. Wilkinson and et al., “Landscape and Settlement in the Neo-Assyrian Empire”: 28–30. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 2�� Usta and Tonghini handle the moderate-scale irrigation works by their own efforts at local level. Owing to the abundance of springs and groundwater in the past, even small settlements were likely to gain a self-reliant character for the water-resource management in Mosul.83 This is also indicated by the presence of many unidentified canal traces around Khorsabad and Nineveh, which differ from the ancient patterns due to being fragmentary and disconnected.84 Although further archaeological field research is needed to define these canal traces clearly, it is probable that some of them are the remains of intensive agricultural use in the Ottoman period, particularly in the 19th century when agriculture gained a commercial character due to an increasing interregional and foreign demand which intensified the investments from the state and local elites in the rural landscape of Mosul. It was reported in 1845 that the governor-general of Mosul had irrigation ditches constructed to divert the water from a river to his cotton fields.85 Those ditches can be associated with the indefinite canal traces in the landscape, though it was unspecified from which river the water was drawn. A complex picture emerges for the features of the water infrastructure in Mosul when fragmentary evidence from primary sources is juxtaposed with the interesting narratives of the Turkish cosmographers in the 17th century. The provincial codes of Mosul indicate that “they [the inhabitants of Mosul] cultivated [green leafy vegetables] on the land by drawing the water from wells (kuyu in Turkish) with an ox and laborer.”86 The term ‘well’ was used to refer to ditches or channels where the water was poured out and then needed to be lifted up for use.87 It is apparent that the villagers of Mosul used various kinds of water-lifting devices in which either animals or men were harnessed as the source of power to turn a pulley or wheel for drawing the water. The archival documentation shows that the Persian wheel, known as dōlāb, was the most common type of water-lifting device in the hinterland of Mosul; for example, a waqf record attests to the use of several dōlābs in the village of Reşidiye 83 84 85 86 87 Wilkinson and et al., “Landscape and Settlement in the Neo-Assyrian Empire”: 29. Ur, “Sennacherib’s Northern Assyrian Canals:”: 324, 333, 338. Charles Issawi, The Fertile Crescent 1800–1914 (A Documentary Economic History) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988): 454. Gündüz, Osmanlı İdaresinde Musul: 466. For the methods of irrigation, see Jonathan M. Wagstaff, The Evolution of Middle Eastern Landscapes An Outline to A.D. 1840 (London & Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985): 60–63. For a general information on the medieval hydraulic technology across Europe and Middle East, see Donald R. Hill, A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times (London &New York: Routledge, 1996): 127–155. Idem, section three of the article “MĀ.” In Encyclopedia of Islam II, 5 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1986): 860–862. https://www.nisanyansozluk.com/kelime/kuyu. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 2�7 on the Tigris banks (Reshidiyāh) in 1597.88 In the same report mentioned above, the governor-general of Mosul, also used dōlābs to raise the water from the ditches to the gardens with a chain of buckets pulled by horses.89 In this method of water-lifting, draught animals or humans when necessary were attached by a beam to a horizontal gear wheel which was connected to another vertical gear wheel. The vertical wheel was connected by a shaft to the largest wheel, which was positioned above the water supply. Every rotation of the power source turned the gear wheels and the largest wheel after that, which pulled the water above the water supply with an attached bucket chain. The lifted water was then poured into an outlet and ran down to the settlements.90 Regarding the irrigation system in Mosul, the descriptions given by the Turkish cosmographers are short and general and fail to provide a clear picture consistent with the information derived from primary sources. For example, Aşık Mehmed wrote in the late 16th century that “the people of Mosul have many benefits from the Tigris and they can carry water to wherever they want with karezs.”91 Karez or qanat was the name of an irrigation technique peculiar to the geographies of Iran and Iraq which was based on the use of gravity to create water flow in an underground tunnel between higher and lower elevations.92 First, a main well was drilled into the water table, and then several subsidiary wells were drilled as access shaft at regular intervals of 50–150 meters for maintenance and ventilation.93 Despite what Aşık Mehmed claims, the archaeological surveys do not confirm that the underground water tunnels had ever been used in the rural hinterland of Mosul in ancient times, nor do the archival sources corroborate the presence of any underground water tunnels in the Ottoman period.94 Perhaps Aşık Mehmed does not mean under- 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 TS. MA. d. 3646, p. 1. Issawi, The Fertile Crescent 1800–1914: 453. Hill, “MĀ”: 861–862. Hill describes the method of animal-powered lifting water by relying on the passages from Al-Jazari, the famous medieval Islamic engineer. See also, Ibn al-Razzāz al-Jazari, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (Kitāb fi ma ʿrifat al-hiyal al-handasiyya), translated and annotated by Donald R. Hill (Dordrecht & Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1974): 179–181. Âşık Mehmed, Menâzırü’l-Avâlim, II, ed. Mahmut Ak (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2007): 758. Karez was a Persian term to refer to underground water channels and was used interchangeably with the term “qanat”. Xavier de Planhol, “KĀRIZ i. Terminology.” Encyclopeadia Iranica, XV/6, pp. 564–565, available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles /kariz_1 (accessed 30 December 2012). Wagstaff, The Evolution of Middle Eastern Landscapes: 60–61. Bonacossi, “The Water for Nineveh”: 100. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 2�8 Usta and Tonghini ground tunnels when he says karez, but instead refers to ditches and channels with this term by mistake. His comments on the irrigation system of Mosul continue with watermills. To vividly portray the technical skills of the people of Mosul in capitalizing on the water power, he gives an interesting account of a watermill in a village that neighbored the ruins of ancient Nineveh as follows: There is a village on the border of Nineveh and there is a watermill in that village. Its wheel (grindstone) and other devices are made of stone. That watermill turns continuously, and when the miller wants to bring it to a stop, he says “Stop in the name of Jonah!” and the grinding stone comes to a stop but the water keeps flowing. As soon as the miller has finished his task, he delegates his work to someone else and says “I have done it,” and the watermill begins to turn again. The benefits of that watermill are abundant.95 The village mentioned by Aşık Mehmed here could be one of the villages of Koyuncuk, Necmi and Kaim which were located around the ruins of Nineveh. Given the certainty that the possible village was in immediate contiguity to Nineveh, it is likely that the mill described by him received the water from the Khinis which flowed out of the River Khosr. No matter how captivating the information that he offers, however, one should take his accounts and those of the other Turkish cosmographers with a pinch of salt, because the authenticity of their information is uncertain, particularly on the use of boat-mills on the Tigris. Let us note, for instance, the following description by Aşık Mehmed of boat mills: They have built waterwheels on the Tigris and established mills on ships [floating] in the middle of the Tigris, all of which are turned by the water of the Tigris. The ships with mills are moving from one place to another.96 95 96 “Nînevî haddinde bir karye vardur. Bu karyede bir âsyâb vardur ki çarhını ve sâyir cemîʾ âlâtını sengden düzmişlerdür ve bu âsyâb hemvâr deverân ider ve tahhân seng-i âsyânun vukūfın irâde itse ‘Yûnus hakkı içün dur’ dir ve seng-i âsyâ durup cereyân ider ve tahhân şuglından fârig olduktan sonra devr olup dir ki ‘işüm temâm oldı’. Fi’l-hâl seng-i âsyâ deverâna şürûʾ ider ve bu âsyânun dahl ü menfeʾatı sebîldür” Âşık Mehmed, Menâzırü’l-Avâlim, II: 757. Âşık Mehmed, Menâzırü’l-Avâlim, II: 758. Boat-mills, a tradition inherited from the Islamic medieval era, were a low-cost and efficient solution to meet the great demand for ground grain in preference to the land-based mills, because boat-mills operated even when the river flow became violent due to flooding. Donald R. Hill, “Mechanical Engineering in the Medieval Near East,” Scientific American, 264–5 (May 1991): 103; Marjorie Nice Boyer, “Water Mills: A Problem for the Bridges and Boats of Medieval France.” In History JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 2�9 Aşık Mehmed appears here to be astonished by the boat-mills on the Tigris and he further states that he had seen similar mills floating on the Danube while on a military campaign in western Hungary in 1593–1594.97 He completed writing his cosmography in 1596–1598 when he was in retirement in Damascus. Although he is thought to have actually visited Mosul, it was possible that he drew inspiration from the medieval Islamic cosmographers when writing on the water infrastructure and even the boat-mills in the section of Mosul.98 Given that the Ottoman geographic knowledge of the Arab lands was largely based on the geographic corpus of the medieval Islamic scholars, it is understandable that the Turkish cosmographers relied on the references from that corpus to describe unfamiliar geographies. For example, Katib Çelebi, another famous Turkish cosmographer from the first half of the 17th century, repeats the identical passages of Aşık Mehmed about the boat-mills and karezs.99 It is interesting that although Katib Çelebi is known to have stopped over in Mosul while returning from the Baghdad campaign in 1626, he seems to have relied on either Aşık Mehmed or the earlier Islamic cosmographers for his references on the water infrastructure of Mosul. Evliya Çelebi, the renowned Ottoman traveler and writer who visited Mosul in 1655, is also akin to other Turkish cosmographers in his description of the water infrastructure in Mosul, but his passages include very interesting references from the Turkish translation of Mığdisi ibn-i Bay Haki-i Yarmeni, an Armenian historical or geographical work which does not survive today.100 He reminds the reader of the past glorious days of the ancient hydraulic heritage 97 98 99 100 of Technology (Seventh Annual Volume, 1982), eds. A. Rupert Hall and Norman Smith (London: Mansell Publishing Limited, 1982): 7–8. Franz Taeschner, “ʾĀshik Muhammad b. ʿUthmân b. Bâyezîd,” Encyclopaedia of Islam II, I (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1986): 697. Ibn Hawkal, a 10th century Arab geographer and chronicler, recorded the best known most description of boat-mills on the Tigris. He said that numerous boat-mills on the Tigris moored to the bank by iron chains and each had four grinding stones that capable of processing ten tons of grain daily. Similarly, Ibn Jubayr, a 12th-century Iberian scholar, witnessed the boat-mills floating on the Khabur River and likened them to dams. Hill, A History of Engineering: 165–166. Probably, the boat-mills, like dams, were built in the river in the dry season and began to work when the river was flooding. Harverson, “Watermills in Iran,”: 159. Kâtib Çelebi, Kitâb-ı Cihânnümâ li-Kâtib Çelebi, I: Tıpkıbasım (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2009): 433. Robert Dankoff, “‘Mığdısı’: An Armenian Source for the Seyahatname,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 76, (Festschrift Andreas Tietze zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet von seinen Freunden und Schülern-1986), 73–79; 75. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 270 Usta and Tonghini in Mosul in a lively fashion by paraphrasing Mığdisi’s text.101 Accordingly, He notes, for instance, that in ancient Mosul Nineveh countless vineyards, rose gardens and watermelon fields were irrigated day and night.102 To irrigate the fields, 70,000 watermills were established on the right and left banks of the Tigris, each mill was like the wheel of Hama in size.103 Nevertheless, this intensive irrigation depleted the water of the Tigris while flowing southward, which annoyed the cities of Medayin104 and caused the people of Medayin cursed ancient Mosul, saying, “let Mosul be devastated!”.105 However, Evliya’s description, or his paraphrase of Mığdisi’s text, on the water infrastructure of Mosul refers to an unspecified period, though his accounts could have been related to any century in the pre-Islamic period. 7 Mills and Their Environment in Late 17th and 18th Centuries In the late 17th and 18th centuries, there was a visible effort made by the urban entrepreneurial elites to renovate abandoned watermills. The interest and motivation for activating more watermills is related to Mosul’s new political economy, which was shaped by a series of intermittent wars between the Ottoman and Safavid Empires in Iraq in the 17th and 18th centuries.106 Dina Rizk Khoury has convincingly explained how the wars had a transformative effect on the society and economy of Mosul, suggesting that the Ottoman success in Iraq against the Safavids was partly dependent on the productive cooperation between the local elites of Mosul and the Ottoman government.107 The local elites, such as the families of Jalili and Ömeri, were authorized to collect the tax revenues that belonged to the state in return for supplying grain, 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 Evliyâ Çelebi b. Derviş Mehemmed Zıllî, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi- IV. Kitap, Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesi Bağdat 305 Numaralı Yazmanın Transkripsiyonu-Dizini, eds. Yücel Dağlı and Seyit Ali Kahraman (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2000): 322–323. Derviş Mehemmed Zıllî, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi- IV. Kitap: 322. Ibid.: 322–23. Medâin was the name of the Parthian and Sasanid metropolis that comprised several adjacent cities along the Tigris about 30 km southeast of Baghdad. Ctesiphon, which was the administrative center of the Parthian and Sasanid empires, was located on the eastern bank. M. Streck and M. Morony, “AL-Madâ’ın,” Encyclopedia of Islam II, V (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1986): 945–46. Derviş Mehemmed Zıllî, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi- IV. Kitap: 322. Khoury, State and Provincial Society: 44; Robert Olson, “The Siege of Mosul: War and Revolution in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–1743.” (Unpublished PhD thesis, Indiana University, June 1973): 57–62. Khoury, State and Provincial Society: 48–58. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 271 troops and animals to the Ottoman army. This interdependence translated into an increased investment in the grain economy, including watermills. The fiscal accounts produced by the provincial treasury of Mosul contain several entries showing the Jalili family’s involvement in the management of watermills. Before examining the entries, however, it should be noted that the renovated watermills cannot be associated with the 16th-century mills shown by the tax-registers. Even though a small number of the sites of 17th-century mills were associated with a settlement, it is still necessary to consider the possibility that some of the mills dated from the 17th and 18th centuries were established after the last-compiled tax register of the 16th century. It is therefore impossible to estimate how many of the 17th-century mills dated from earlier periods and how many were built for the first time. Despite this lack of information, the fiscal entries below provide convincing evidence to suggest that watermills reached the second period of revival after the mid-16th century. In the first entry recorded on 25 July 1700, a ruined watermill called değirmen-i Veyis Paşa, in an unspecified location, was leased from the provincial treasury of Mosul to El Hajj Jalil veled-i (the son of) Abdül Jalil on the condition that he undertook to repair it. The water mill in question appears to have been abandoned in the last decade of the 16th century, because the entry stated that its walls were entirely collapsed and it remained in ruins and thus unclaimed for more than a hundred years before the date of the entry.108 The restoration of abandoned mills created an opportunity for urban entrepreneurs to take the land adjacent to the mill site and channels into private ownership, because the Ottoman law enabled someone to hold a plot of land privately on condition that they irrigated it by their own capital and labor.109 Mill ownership thus made it possible to control water resources so that the local elites could better dominate the countryside.110 In another entry kept on 16 December 1729, a local notable who was named Murad and identified as the descendant of Abdül Jalil (Abdülcelilzâde), developed almost 6.5 hectares of uncultivated land surrounding his watermills on the Khosr River around the village of Necmi by establishing gardens, vineyards and orchards. He received the confirmation of the kadı (judge in an Islamic court, and also a local administrative official) for the ownership of the land around his mills, probably to prevent a claim to his agricultural estates.111 It seems that his estates were prob108 109 110 111 MAD 9836, p. 25. Şensoy, İstanbul’un Vakıf Su Tarihi: 37–55. Khoury, State and Provincial Society: 195. MAD 9836, p. 26: The size of the land was specified in the document as zirâʾ, a general Ottoman measurement of length for dry goods and architecture, “tûlen 500 zirâʾ ve ʿarzen 250 zirâʾdır.” Accordingly, the land was rectangular in shape. If we accept that a JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 272 Usta and Tonghini ably located between the Kisiri canal112 and the Khosr River, and he probably diverted water from the canal to supply the water for his mills and gardens. Taken together with other entries, it can be concluded from the entry showing Murad’s investment above that the downstream area of the Khosr River, including watermills, was once partly abandoned. An entry dated 7 February 1690 shows that several ruined watermills on the Khosr River passed into the waqf of Mehmed Beğ’s family, who was the governor-general of Mosul. For one of these watermills near the village of Koyuncuk, which remained unclaimed upon the death of its first owner, he obtained the necessary title-deed from the provincial treasury, provided that he would repair and reuse it. Mehmed Beğ was a typical governor-general figure who managed the state revenues generated by the economic resources of Mosul in the 17th century.113 After his death, the mill near Koyuncuk was deeded by his heirs to a man from the city whose name was Yasin.114 Another entry dated September 1730 shows that the trustees of the waqf of Mehmed Beğ leased two other ruined watermills on the Khosr River to a descendant of Mehmed Beğ, on condition that he undertook to repair it.115 It is not surprising that idle mills were reactivated under the supervision of the waqfs established by the elites of the society of Mosul; because, even though small farmers with limited access to capital and labor could forge a provincial solidarity in matters related to water infrastructure, it was challenging for them to compete with the elites to take the ownership of watermills and other irrigation components in the face of social and economic troubles in the 17th century. Widespread poverty caused by the deteriorated economic conditions overwhelmed Mosul and its hinterland in the second half of the 17th century.116 Suffering the greed of the tax-collectors, poor harvests and dis- 112 113 114 115 116 zirâʾ approximately measured 73 cm in architectural works, the size of the land would be 66,612.5 sq. Meters. Cengiz Kallek, “Parmak.” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, 34(İstanbul: ISAM Yayınları, 2007): 172–73. Ur, “Sennacherib’s Northern Assyrian Canals”: 321. Khoury, State and Provincial Society: 55. MAD 9836, p. 7. C. EV. 75/3725. Domenico Lanza served in the Dominican Mission in Mosul for the periods of 1754–1761 and 1764–1770. He left behind valuable passages about the social and economic life in Mosul and its environs in his manuscript for the years between 1753 and 1771. He stated in the 1750s that, “the older inhabitants have often told me that, in their time, almost half of the city consisted of uninhabited ruins and that the population was about a third less than now.” It seems that the older inhabitants were speaking the conditions 50–60 years before their time, that is, the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Issawi, The Fertile Crescent, 1800–1914: 94. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 273 ease, the rural population became dispersed, and consequently watermills fell into disrepair due to poor maintenance.117 Leaving aside the social and economic factors, however, one reason for the dereliction of the watermills may also be related to the flow regime of the Tigris River Basin. In the hinterland of Mosul, several small streams fed by the springs on the Zagros Mountains join the Tigris and carried the risk of flooding, particularly in the downstream areas, when it rains heavily and for days in winter and spring. The streams also swelled to flood when the snow lying on the Zagros Mountains melted during the spring.118 Such an environment was likely to lead to frequent flash floods that stone-built watermills could barely withstand.119 The flood threat posed by the Tigris and its streams is reflected in the passages of Abdülkadir Efendi, the 17th-century Ottoman military chronicler, who recounts how it hampered the army transportation. He reports that in December 1629 the Ottoman army were stranded in Mosul for two or three months due to the harsh winter conditions and the flooding of the Tigris.120 Another chronicler, Naîmâ, states that the heavy fall of snow came after torrential rains in the winter of 1629 and it took by surprise the senior people of Mosul who had never seen snow before.121 On the other hand, the transportation problems caused by the Tigris and its streams were not caused only by flooding in the winter, as is shown by Abdülkadir Efendi. In August, the peasants of Mosul were urged to dredge and dig the riverbed of the Tigris deep enough to increase the water flow, which had slowed down during the summer and therefore made it difficult for the transport vessels to float on the river.122 River cleaning was an arduous but necessary task that needed to be completed by the end of summer, because the Tigris and its streams carried an enormous amount of silt and sediment every time there was a catastrophic flooding, which happened periodically.123 Regarding this natural phenom- 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 Khoury, State and Provincial Society: 53. Issawi, The Fertile Crescent: 99–100. Robert McCormick Adams, Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981): 3. Michael Given, “The Precarious Conviviality of Watermills.” Archaeological Dialogues, 25–1 (June, 2018): 86–88. McPhillips, “Harnessing the Hydraulic Power in Ottoman Syria”: 155. Abdülkadir Efendi, Topçular Kâtibi ʿAbdülkādir (Kadrî) Efendi Tarihi (metin ve tahlil), II, ed. Doç. Dr. Ziya Yılmazer (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2003): 907. Naîmâ Mustafa Efendi, Târih-i Naʾîmâ (Ravzatü’l-Hüseyn Fî Hulâsati Ahbâri’l-Hâfikayn), II, ed. Mehmet İpşirli, (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2007): 651. Abdülkadir Efendi, Topçular Kâtibi, II: 944. Adams, Heartland of Cities, 6–7. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 274 Usta and Tonghini enon, Abdülkadir Efendi states that the Zab River reached such strength and speed that it rolled boulders like apples in rainy seasons.124 8 The Institutionalization of Mills in the Mid-18th and 19th Centuries Keeping watermills operative in Mosul became particularly important during the 19th century as the tremendous increase in its regional trade with neighboring regions, particularly Baghdad, motivated the local elites to invest in the countryside from the 18th century onwards.125 Khoury demonstrates that a substantial portion of the capital that was invested in a rural area was transferred into mill ownership.126 As mentioned in the previous section, the renovated watermills were mostly concentrated around the River Khosr, but the waqf registers examined in this section are more concerned with the institutionalization of the watermills by the family waqfs in the 19th century, rather than mill renovations. It is probable that a large number of ruined mills had already been repaired and reused by the end of the 18th century, as agricultural growth increased the demand for more mills. Besides, the institutionalized mills are generally dispersed over the settlements on the foothill of the Bashiqa mountain, with Khoury showing that the Jalili and Ömeri families, the local notables of Mosul, owned a number of watermills in the villages of Bashiqa and Bahzani.127 It will be seen in the following examples that the watermills in the 19th-century Mosul acquired a social role by financially supporting public facilities under the waqf management. An earlier document for the cases of watermills under the waqf management is dated to 1748 and shows that Yahya Ağazade Mahmud Bey, a local notable, established a waqf to finance two madrasas and two masjids that built in the city of Mosul.128 He endowed his 25/60 shares in one of the watermills on the Nawran stream, together with a bath, a shop and a café in different locations, to his waqf. Although the document provides no physical description of that endowed watermill, it gives the name of the mill as Ali Beğ değirmeni and describes its location as being the third mill on the Nawran stream from the direction of the fountain. The Nawran stream flows through the hilly terrain of the Bashiqa Mountain at an altitude of 500 m above sea level and reaches 124 125 126 127 128 Abdülkadir Efendi, Topçular Kâtibi, II: 910. Khoury, “The Introduction of Commercial Agriculture in the Province of Mosul”: 157. Ibid.: 160. Ibid.: 222 in footnotes. VGMA. EVM. d., no. 386, p. 106. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 275 the River Khosr at about 2 km.129 Considering that the stream is shallow, it was certainly necessary to establish a dam at the headwater of the stream to keep the water in a reservoir and then to divert it into the channels connected to the watermills. In close proximity to the River Khosr, there were two other watermills endowed to finance the public facilities. The rent from one of these watermills was endowed to the waqf of Yunus Efendi, who had built a social complex that contained a mosque, madrasa, and public library in the quarter of Faharîye in 1789.130 The other watermill, in the village of Babuhend, belonged to Firdevs Hanım, a benefactress who in 1828 endowed it as waqf for a madrasa located in the Kara Ali Hamamı in the south of Mosul in 1828.131 It was not just watermills on the River Khosr that were endowed thus. Another document shows one-third of the shares in a watermill on the River Khazir among the assets of the waqf of Hacibe Zeynep Hanım who had built a small mosque and madrasa in 1823.132 The revenues of the watermills were reserved not only for the financial support of public facilities, but also, in the case of family awqāf, for the descendants of some high-ranking person. It was not peculiar to the 19th century that the mill revenues were allocated to finance family members because, as seen in the previous section, the governor-general of Mosul owned watermills in his family waqf in the 17th century. It is likely that the watermills under a long-term ownership of the local elites gained a better maintenance and endured for a long duration in the landscape. For example, the highest amount of revenue was recorded as 5,000 ghurūsh (a large silver coin) or the one-year rent of a watermill in Basahrāh among the assets owned by the waqf of the descendants of Emin Bey (Ömerîzâde) in 1869–1870. The waqf also owned a one-fourth share, amounting to 750 ghurūsh, of the annual rent of a watermill in the village of Tercele and also it received 500 ghurūsh from the rent of another mill. In addition, the waqf spent 500 ghurūsh for the renovation of the watermills in Bashiqa.133 The investment in the management of watermills by the local elites was closely associated with the efficient use of water channels and also increased 129 130 131 132 133 Suhayla A. Dabbagh, M.H. Kasım and I.C. Baid, “Ecological Observations on the Macrobenthos of the Nawran Stream, Mosul, Iraq.” Japan L. Limnol, 37/2 (1976): 68. EV. d. 13710, p. 3. EV. d. 13710, p. 13. EV. d. 13710, p. 5. EV. HMH, 9334, p. 12. In the mid-19th century, one ghurūsh was minted from 1 gr silver and 100 ghurūsh was equivalent to one golden lira that contained 6,6 gr gold. Şevket Pamuk, Pamuk, “Part V Money in the Ottoman Empire:” 973. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 27� Usta and Tonghini grain cultivation. The local notables are likely to have improved the condition of the existing irrigation infrastructure by maintaining it more regularly than had been the case in earlier periods and properly with the cooperation of villagers, rather than constructing new canals and reservoirs to supply water to their mills and crop fields. As regards the nature of agricultural production in Mosul in the 19th century, Sarah Shields observes that although Mosul intensified its commercial relations with neighboring regions, largely by exporting grain and secondarily cotton, tobacco, vegetables and fruits, this economic expansion and the massive shift in production to cash crops did not introduce new techniques and modern methods in agriculture to the countryside during the 19th century. Instead, the peasants carried on with their traditional farming methods and lived on subsistence production that they found sufficient to make a living and meet the market demand.134 Shield proceeds to demonstrate that Mosul was in fact able to generate a produce surplus even though most of the region was cultivated by subsistence farmers. To explain why subsistence farming persisted in the countryside of Mosul in the 19th century, she points out that nomads exhibited larger economic growth based on the export of livestock and animal products than the sedentary groups engaged in cultivation.135 It would therefore be a mistake to assume that the increased regional trade, which encouraged the local notables to be more oriented toward farming, led to the establishment of new milling installations in the marginal lands where there were limited irrigation facilities. Conclusion Watermills were an indispensable part of food processing in any rural landscape in the past, and their study includes a variety of different topics within the overarching scope of social and economic history, such as capital, entrepreneurship, settlement patterns, environment and technology. Previous studies of the tax-register series are limited to documentary analyses and most of them have not taken a broader interdisciplinary approach, including archaeology 134 135 Shields, Mosul Before Iraq: 157. Ibid.: 117. Idem., “Regional Trade and 19th-Century Mosul: Revising the Role of Europe in the Middle East Economy.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 23 (1991): 26. Idem, “Sheep, Nomads and Merchants in Nineteenth-Century Mosul: Creating Transformations in an Ottoman Society.” Journal of Social History, 25–4 (Summer, 1992): 776–779. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 277 and surface surveys.136 In particular, some of the previous studies that seek to take an interdisciplinary approach through the prism of historical geography tend to dismiss the traces of the material culture elements in landscapes, such as the remnants of mill installations or any other building traces that could remain from a dye-house, tavern, and sheepfold.137 Therefore, what is needed is a reconsideration of the tax-registers of the Ottoman lands integrated with archaeology. Consequently, the findings of this paper present a number of encouraging implications for future research. The paper offers a methodological approach on how to use archaeological data together with documentary sources derived from the Ottoman archive. The Ottoman Empire, by its nature, can be likened to a giant garden that contains various multicolored plants of different shapes and design. In a vast territorial area stretching from the Pannonian Plain to the Sahara Desert in Tunisia, through the Balkans, Anatolia and Arab lands, one may come across a wide range of different formations and patterns regarding water-resource management, settlements, productions, human-environment interactions and so on and each deserves a thorough scholarly examination. The Ottoman Empire took over its giant garden gradually from various owners, but the imperial rule did not last long enough to achieve the goal of applying a consistent and uniform design to its garden. Perhaps it did not strongly desire to do it. Instead, it seems to have accepted the garden the way it was and then kept the different colors and designs there in harmony. As mentioned before, water-resource management in the Mosul region was shaped in a nomadic character before the inauguration of Ottoman rule, unlike in the Levant lands where the relatively more favorable economic and political conditions under Mamluk rule shaped the dynamics of production for the market-oriented economy of the Mediterranean, and thus enabled 136 137 For a review of the studies based on the tax-register series, see Erhan Afyoncu, “Türkiye’de Tahrir Defterlerine Dayalı Olarak Hazırlanmış Bazı Çalışmalar Hakkında Görüşler.” Türkiye Araştırmaları Literatür Dergisi, 1–1 (2003): 267–286. For a selection of studies based on the historical geography of the Ottoman lands, see Wolf Dieter Hütteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah, Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjordan and Southern Syria in the late 16th century (Erlangen: Fränkischen Geographischen Gesellschaft: Palm und Enke, 1977). Hütteroth, The pattern of settlement in Palestine in the 16th century: geographical research on Turkish Daftar-i Mufassal (Jerusalem: Institute of Asian and African Studies Hebrew University, 1970). Nejat Göyünç and Wolf Dieter Hütteroth, Land an Der Grenze: Osmanische Verwaltung im heutigen türkisch-syrisch-irakischen Grenzegebiet im 16. Jahrhundert (İstanbul: Eren Yayıncılık, 1997). Osman Gümüşçü, XVI. Yüzyıl Larende (Karaman) Kazasında Yerleşme ve Nüfus (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2001). JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 278 Usta and Tonghini state-sponsored investment in irrigation infrastructure. Despite this, the local initiatives by entrepreneurial small-scale farmers and peasant producers in Mosul played a major role in developing the irrigation infrastructure, without leaning on the supervision of a mighty imperial authority. Therefore, the Ottoman sultans and their servants focused their attention on improving the irrigation infrastructure in southern Mesopotamia rather than Mosul and northern Mesopotamia. The watermills with penstock drop-towers can be considered as a spatially explicit indicator for the past channel networks in other semi-arid landscapes. Any increase or decrease in the number of such watermills should be interpreted in relation not only to changes in grain production but also to the efficiency of the present irrigation network. The archaeological discussion in this paper has indicated that the watermills surveyed in the northeastern hinterland of Mosul were designed with a penstock drop-tower which received a constant flow of water from irrigation channels. For this reason, it is not a coincidence that the documents analyzed in this paper link the location of watermills with settlements in the wadi streams where the water channels and dams had once been established by the ancient Assyrians. As Wilkinson and Rayne suggest, ancient traditions initiated the technological foundations of the water supply systems on which the later traditions developed, whereby the same systems continued in chronological order from one civilization to the next in parts of the Near East.138 It is evident from the accounts of the Turkish cosmographers that the literate Ottomans had knowledge, albeit of a legendary nature, of the hydraulic imprint of the ancient Assyrians on the hinterland of Mosul. It is probable that one generation received the technical know-how to build the irrigation infrastructure from the previous generation and passed it on to the next in Mosul and its hinterland. The Mosuli farmers and peasants probably believed that past experience could produce positive results for them too, and it is likely that their water-related construction works were patterned to a varying degree upon the historical legacy of the irrigation system left by the ancient Assyrians. Taking into account the longue durée perspective, the unaltering geographic and environmental factors may have called for more or less similar courses of action concerning the establishment of an irrigation infrastructure in the rural landscape of Mosul. However, it would be wrong to assume that the Assyrian hydraulic heritage continued uninterrupted until the Ottoman period, as the development of irrigation systems was directly tied to the variable degrees of political stability and economic growth. An expansion of grain cultivation was 138 Wilkinson and Rayne, “Hydraulic Landscapes and Imperial Power in the Near East”: 123. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period 279 essential to increase the number of watermills and improve the conditions of the irrigation infrastructure in the region of Mosul; this could materialize only when Mosul was integrated into an interregional economic system under an imperial rule that fostered the agricultural economy and farming communities. After the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Mosul’s economy experienced again a tremendous expansion under the rule of the Umayyad and Abbasid empires, serving as grain supplier for Kufe, Baghdad and Basra, the large cities in southern Mesopotamia.139 Being such a granary undoubtedly led to the development of watermills and the improvement of irrigation infrastructure in Mosul and its hinterland for most of the Middle Islamic Period. The Ottoman period laid the ground for a revival in economic growth and agricultural expansion in Mosul towards the mid-16th century, which regained for the city and its hinterland the role of granary, particularly for Baghdad. Despite short-term setbacks, Mosul maintained its position in wider interregional economic relations shaped by the agricultural production, and so its watermills vigorously continued grinding grain in the following centuries. More regional histories can be reconstructed through the study of watermills, just as this paper provides a model for Mosul. While an increased number of watermills in a landscape was directly associated with an economic and demographic growth trend, including an improved water infrastructure, a decrease in the number of mills or an increase in the frequency of ruined and idle mills indicates the opposite trend. In this regard, the historical mills can be taken as a useful indicator of economic and demographic stability. For the 17th century, in particular, on the one hand the renovation and reuse of ruined watermills may indicate a revival in the agricultural economy and also a resilience on the part of rural communities in the face of calamitous events, but on the other hand the presence of many idle watermills may reflect the devastating impact of the century’s general crisis, partially related to climate anomalies associated with the Little Ice Age.140 However, a note of caution is due here, because it is difficult to reach the exact number of the mills in a landscape through the archival documents of the 17th century. Such an attempt is easier for the 16th century, thanks to the generosity of the comprehensive tax-registers for their data on tax-revenues. Still, the tax-registers tend to have counted fewer mills than the actual number, which stems from the tax-related issues concerning mills. To understand the extent of the economic revival in the countryside in the 17th century, it might be very useful to find out how many mills fell into disuse and how many of the ruined mills were repaired for reuse. 139 140 Kennedy, “The Feeding of the Five Hundred”: 190. White, Climate of Rebellion: 1–14. JESHO �� (2023) 237–287 280 Usta and Tonghini Acknowledgement The author Onur Usta kindly thanks Gerda Henkel Stiftung for awarding him a research grant for his project in 2018, “Land Use, Settlement Patterns, and River Irrigation in Upper Mesopotamia in the Sixteenth Century: The Case of Mosul.” Bibliography Primary Sources Presidency State Archive of Turkey The tax-register series of Mosul (Musul Mufassal Tapu-Tahrir Defterleri) No: TT. d. no. 195; TT. d. no. 308; TT. d. no. 660. Documents from the Cevdet Collection for Endowments (Cevdet Evkâf): C. EV 75/3725. Finance registers of the Topkapı Palace (Topkapı Sarayı Maliye Defterleri): TS. MA. d. 3646. 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