'IRAQ AND THE PERSIAN GULF' [‎281r] (564/862)

IRRIGATION, AGRICULTURE, AND MINOR INDUSTRY 435
channels and a general system of modern works were built, of which
the Abu Ghuraib is the latest (1937). By the completion of the Kut
projects since 1940, water in the Shatt al Gharraf and the Shatt
Dujaila has been controlled and a whole new zone has been redeemed.
These works were done under the inspiration of a small but enthu
siastic Irrigation Department, and their labours were supplemented
by the equal enthusiasm of the Department of Agriculture, which
introduced new methods and new crops.
In the areas watered by the Euphrates there are two principal
differences from the ancient system. The first is that, because of the
rise in level of the Tigris bed and the use of Tigris water for riverain
cultivation, the Tigris can no longer act as a drainage channel for the
whole area between the two rivers south of Baghdad, where now
salination is a perpetual problem and where surplus waters form
extensive marshes. The second difference is that below Musaiyib,
where there is now a dual system for the distribution of the Euphrates
waters in the Hindiya and Hilla channels, there was in the nine
centuries before the Moslem conquest a great channel, the Pallacopas,
which took off from its right bank the surplus waters of the Euphrates
some distance below Babylon and greatly mitigated the extension of
the marshes of the lower Euphrates. This system collapsed at the
end of tho Sassanid period when the Great Swamp was formed south
of Kufa and Wasit (p. 31). The credit for the gradual recovery
of the lower delta lands of the Euphrates belongs largely to nature
(p. 50), but also to the unremitting but uncoordinated labours of
generations of rice cultivators during the post-Abbasid period.
There are still two great canal systems of the Tigris—the Ishaqi
and Dujail on the right bank, the Nahrwan on the left—which remain
derelict, and neither can be restored in its original form because of
changes in the river courses. The waters of the Diyala are used for
irrigation of a broad belt along its course in the plain north of Baghdad,
and it is possible that even greater use could be made of it in the area
covered by the lower Nahrwan.
Modern Irrigation
The following summary account, based on inadequate material,
should be supplemented by an account of irrigation in Iraq shortly
to be published by the Irrigation Department (1944).
South of the Jabal Hamrin almost all cultivation depends upon
some form of irrigation: either by distributing water from rivers and
canals by direct flow on to the land through a network of small