Measuring floods, making paper, gathering books

Curriculum expectations

A3.4 — describe significant physical features and natural processes and events in a few early societies, including at least one First Nation and one Inuit society […] and how they affected these societies, with a focus on the societies’ sustainability and food production […]

A3.6 — identify and describe some of the major scientific and technological developments in the ancient and medieval world, including some from at least one First Nation and one Inuit society […]

Brief

This lesson asks you to describe natural events such as river floods and how they affected a society, and to identify major scientific and technological developments of the medieval world. The curriculum asks for a few societies, including a First Nation and an Inuit society; the museum links only medieval Islamic examples, so your class will add the others. ¹

What did the river or the new tool change?

The expectations ask how natural events such as floods affected a society, and what major developments it made. Pick one event and one development from the linked records and say what depended on each.

Go deeper

Picture a stone-lined pit beside the Nile. Twenty-four steps lead down into it, and at its centre stands a marble column divided into nineteen cubits; the sixteenth-cubit mark stands for the ideal flood level ². Yeomans writes that the Nilometer measured the height of the Nile waters during the annual flood, and that its readings were essential in setting irrigation policy ³.

Think about it

The column has a mark for the ideal flood level. If a reading showed the water well below that mark, what would you want to know or decide as a farmer or an official, and why?

Into the museum

The Nilometer of Rawda Island: the pit, the column and its cubit marks.
Papermaking in Baghdad: the story of moving a craft to a city, not inventing paper again.
The House of Wisdom: a library in Baghdad that Ahmad Amin describes in Duha al-Islam.

Try this

Open the Nilometer of Rawda Island and make a labelled sketch of the column and its cubit marks, then write what a farmer or an official could decide from a reading.