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Report n°5 : "Water : symbolism and culture"

Water control is a collective challenge

In fact, all four of the most ancient of the great civilisations - Egypt, China, Mesopotamia and Harrapa - came into being on the banks of rivers and in their rich alluvial plains. They were also frequently and lastingly to establish "hydraulic societies(99)" - because the control of water was a collective affair - using their power to control the economy, their allocation of water and the relationship with the deities and the sacred element. This is true of the Mesopotamian civilisation -"between two rivers", an Arabic expression referring to Iraq- which flourished in the region bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates. This region was the birthplace of agriculture - freeing man from the laws of his environment - but was also the cradle of irrigation and home to the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon and, finally, encompassed the "Fertile Crescent" of Phoenicia, Assyria and Babylon.

The same is true of the Harrapan culture (named after one of the most ancient cities on earth, Harrapa in the Punjab, founded over 5,000 years ago) which grew up along the valley of the Indus (today's Pakistan, "gift of the Indus(100)") which reached its apogee towards the end of the 3rd millennium BC. Like Egypt, the Harrapan Civilisation emerged in an arid plain across which flowed a majestic river. To date, over a thousand Harrapan towns have been discovered. Living in a country subject by turns to the whims of the river and to terrible droughts, the inhabitants of these cities demonstrated extraordinary ingenuity, diverting the flow of the river and conserving precious water for the hottest parts of the year. The great city of Mohenjo Daro, in Sind, stood on the banks of the great river and, in addition to a water drainage system, possessed a public bath-house of imposing dimensions. Its inhabitants venerated well -water - drawn from the entrails of the earth - as reflecting the heavens and capturing the forces of earth. The monsoon floods were seen as "the gift of heaven". Under the Persians, water extraction techniques were perfected and wells with water wheels for drawing up water became commonplace: agriculture and husbandry prospered. In the 17th century a sultan from Afghanistan, Ali Mardan Khan, designed the famous gardens of Shalimar in Lahore, whose unheard-of refinement bore testimony to a high degree of skill in water management. Pakistan's hydraulic system today irrigates 14 million hectares - "irrigation both necessary and vital" according to geographer Franck Auriac who adds: "Hydraulic development is a matter of state... Across steppes and desert there has been a succession of landscapes in a regular network that is a model for reference, in a space ordered and organised by water... (101) "

China owes much of its ancient civilisation to the great Yangtze and Yellow rivers that flow down from the Tibetan plateau. The Zhouli is a Chinese manual of hydraulics and hydrology dating from around 1200 BC.

In reality, the Chinese both venerate and fear water: after all, theirs is a land of drought and flooding. It was for this reason that the Middle Empire deified Li Bing, in 250 BC the governor of what is now Sichuan province, and a hydraulics genius who built the first dam on the Minjiang River, a tributary of the Yangtze. He devised a network of canals: open canals for irrigation, closed canals for flood control. Li Bing placed three male statues in the river as a means of monitoring its waters. If the feet of the statues were visible, it meant drought and so the sluice-gates on the dam were opened. If their shoulders were covered in water, flooding threatened and the sluicegates were closed. From that time on, the Chinese made constant progress in water management, introducing sophisticated networks of bamboo pipes to irrigate the fields and bring water into the cities, as early as 1089 in Hangzhou and 1096 in Guangdong. In ancient China, the central authority was divided into six ministries and the Xingbu was responsible for public works, building and water. The Chinese even built hydraulic clocks reproducing the movement of the "three luminaries" - the sun, the moon and certain stars- which were of great importance in drawing up the calendar and in astrological divination(102), two major attributes exclusive to the imperial power. The Arabs were later to excel at building clocks of this kind103 and the gift of such a clock to the Emperor Charlemagne by the Caliph Haroun el Rachid dazzled the Frankish court around 800 AD.

The Chinese were also grateful to water for enabling them to discover... salt. This essential substance was discovered in 6000 BC at Lake Yuncheng(104) and Chinese tradition maintains thatwater, salt and soya are sufficient to the sage to sustain life.

Water and mountains are fundamental to an understanding of Chinese civilisation, its culture, beliefs, painting, philosophy, lifestyle and warlike exploits(105)... Chinese painting, for example, depicts "Celestial Mountains", which in fact is nothing other than "a quest for the sacred between shan (mountain) and shui (water), a meditation on the human condition between nature and the divine, between poet and painter, between Heaven and Earth".

Thus Lan Ying, in the Ming period (1368 - 1644), painted an album whose every page shows gently flowing streams, metaphorical paintings expressing the artist's belief that man living in society must remain serene and let his existence flow as smoothly as the water that runs in the river.

The culture of the sage in China developed over the years as "an awareness of the spiritual dimension of mountain and water, and of nature in general." Applying the principle of Guandao, the sage seeks to "develop a philosophy of life akin to the law of water which flows silently, naturally, without ever turning back(106) ".

In today's China, certain considerations devoid of any spirituality have come to the fore. When asked why the shrine in the family courtyard was no longer tended, one peasant farmer replied, "We used to pray for rain, but now we have irrigation(107)".

This view must be qualified, however, since France's "Year of China" taught us, for example, that in Chongwu (Fujian province) all the schools organise a weekly gathering on the shore of the China Sea -perceived as a strong and binding link between the Chinese people- to pay homage to nature and to instil respect into the unconscious of young people. Similarly, in Yunnan, Hani sorcerers still gather today to allocate water equitably between the rice paddies.

Another example is the opposition to the Three Gorges Dam, which has its strongest roots in the fact that the waters created by the giant dam will submerge cemeteries and thus prevent the celebration of ancestor worship.

The situation calls to mind what Jacques Berque had to say of the construction of the Suez Canal: "Technology is far from being ontologically neutral.We now know that, contrary to the assumptions of the positivists, far from eliminating metaphysical questionings, it both provokes and shapes them(108)".

(99) Karl Wittfogel;"Le despotisme oriental", Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1964.

(100) Recalling the model of the Nile and Egypt (Roger Brunet (under the direction of), "Géographie universelle", Belin - Reclus, Paris, 1995).

(101) Ref 15

(102) David S.Landes, "L'heure qu'il est.Les horloges, la mesure du temps et la formation du monde moderne", Gallimard, Paris, 1987.

(103) Donald R.Hill, "Arabic water clocks", Sources and studies in the history of Arabic-Islamic Science, History of technology series, no.4, Aleppo University, Aleppo (Syria), 1981.

(104) Mark Kurlansky, "Salt:a world history", Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002.

(105) Hagiographies of Mao Zedong (The Great Helmsman, yet another reference to water) report that during the Long March Mao and the Red Army crossed a total of 25 major rivers and 200 smaller rivers.

(106) "Montagnes Célestes, Trésors des musées de Chine", published by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, 2004.

(107) Marie-France Caïs, Marie-José Del Rey et Jean-Pierre Ribaut, "L'eau et la vie. Enjeux, perspectives et visions interculturelles", Editions Charles-Léopold Mayer, Paris, 1999.

(108) Jacques Berque, "L'intérieur du Maghreb", Gallimard, Paris, 1978, p.528.