Bart Schultz
Recently, I've been searching for an answer to the question of what the world's first polder might have been. This information has proven very difficult to find. There are numerous historical descriptions of irrigation systems that must have existed since at least five millennia BC. There are also old descriptions of dikes dating back to at least four millennia BC. But polders are rarely mentioned in these publications.
However, various publications suggest that the oldest polders were likely located in Mesopotamia, the region between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Both rivers originate in Turkey and flow through Syria, Iraq, and downstream through Iran, respectively. The Euphrates and Tigris join together downstream in Mesopotamia to form the Shatt al-Arab, which flows into the Persian Gulf. A previous article on this topic was published on Flevolands Geheugen under the title Polders for date palms at Abadan isle in Iran.
The first author to clearly discuss polders and very old polders was Paul Wagret. He argued that until the fifth millennium BCE, the Persian Gulf extended well upstream of the present-day Shatt al-Arab, and that the Euphrates and Tigris rivers flowed into the Gulf separately. Due to the large amounts of sediment in the rivers, more and more land has been created in the Persian Gulf, and the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab now lies much further south.
As far as we know, the city of Ur, located just north of modern-day Baghdad, was originally built in the fourth millennium BC on an island in the marshes. Wagret reports that the Sumerians drained marshes and created prehistoric polders around Ur. Wagret also writes that a devastating flood from the Persian Gulf occurred between 5000 BC and 3500 BC, destroying civilization around Ur.
In 1978, Belgian geomorphologists Roland Paepe and Cecile Baeteman described four major flooding phases in the Mesopotamian plain. The first occurred at Ur (3600–3500 BCE). Subsequent floods occurred at Kish (2900–2350 BCE) and Tell Ed-Dēr (ca. 2000–1025 BCE), followed by the so-called post-Neo-Babylonian floods (539 BCE–300).
The flood mentioned by Paepe and Baeteman near Ur could very well be the same as the enormous flood mentioned by Wagret, which, according to him, destroyed the city's civilization. Paepe and Baeteman's findings also indicate that major floods occurred from time to time in Mesopotamia. This is also evident from the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, as described by Stephanie Dalley in her study Myths from Mesopotamia. The oldest known flood near Ur supposedly destroyed the entire civilization in the "polder."
Wagret's publication, as well as that of other authors such as Adriaan Volker, William Violet, and Nathan Wasserman, demonstrates that flooding has been occurring in Mesopotamia for thousands of years, particularly in the downstream part of the region. Although polders are only specifically mentioned at a much later date, one might therefore expect that polders may have existed here since ancient times, as Wagret hypothesizes.
Since the middle of the last century, areas in Mesopotamia have been reclaimed in various places. In addition to the later polders around Ur, there are now polders in the Hammar Marshes and the Hawizeh Marshes, the Al-Kahla and Al-Musharrah Marshes, the Central Marshes, and the area on the Iraqi side of the Shatt al-Arab.
In his report The Mesopotamian Marshlands: Demise of an Ecosystem, written in 2001 for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Hassan Partow shows a satellite map of the Mesopotamian Plain from the year 2000. Some of these areas are in a natural state. The reclaimed areas are primarily used for date palms, or have since been abandoned.
More detailed information about the polders in Mesopotamia can be found in the country document on Iraq on the Museum Batavialand website under the Water Management and Polders folder.
