How did people change the land?

Brief

This lesson asks you to describe various ways in which human settlement has affected the environment. The museum links one historical case of people working with water and farmland; the effects of settlement on air, wildlife and climate are for your class to bring from other sources. ¹

What changes when people bring water to land?

Look at what the expectation asks: ways settlement has affected the environment. For the case, note what changed (the land, the water, the plants), who changed it, and what the people hoped to gain.

Go deeper

Al-Baladhuri reports that al-Hajjaj dug the river al-Nil and the river al-Zabi. He named it al-Zabi because he took it from the old al-Zabi, revived the lands on both of them, and founded the town known as al-Nil, which he made a garrison city ². That is all the record preserves: one report, with a page reference. It gives no motive for what al-Hajjaj did, and it says nothing about what changed in the land, the water or the plants. Those are questions the lesson leaves to the class, and a class that answers them should say which part comes from the report and which part it is guessing.

Think about it

Al-Baladhuri says that al-Hajjaj revived lands on both rivers and founded a garrison city. Which effects of digging a canal could you check on a map, which only from other sources, and why can the report alone not settle them?

Into the museum

Al-Nil: the town and the two canals in al-Baladhuri's report.
The digging of the Ubulla canal: another canal in al-Baladhuri, dug for the people of Basra.
Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf: the governor who dug the canals.

Try this

Read the record al-Nil. Make a two-column chart: in one, what people did to land and water; in the other, what you think changed as a result, marking what the record does not say.