Mesopotamia 2550 B.C.: The Earliest Boundary Water Treaty-Juniper Publishers
Archaeology & Anthropology - Juniper Publishers Mini Review Mesilim [or Mesalim, born ca. 2600 B.C.] was the ruler of Kish, a kingdom north of Lagash and Umma, which held a traditional ‘hegemonic’ position in the loose alliance of small adjoining Sumerian city-states in the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, south of what was to become Babylon [4]. Because of the prevailing precarious rainfall conditions, the agricultural economy of the entire delta area has always been crucially dependent on irrigation [5], mainly from the ‘great Tigris’, through an elaborate system of canals and levees which inevitably require close inter-community cooperation. The geographic focus of the bilateral Lagash-Umma agreement, concluded under Mesilim’s authority as external arbiter, was the fertile Gu-edena valley, roughly ten by four kilometers wide and irrigated by Tigris waters from a canal named Lum-magirnunta (probably the modern Shatt al-Hayy) on the border...