Steve Mithen’s Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World is a comprehensive survey of pre-industrial water use across the globe featuring 10 case studies: the Neolithic Levant, Mesopotamia, Greece, Petra, Rome, China, Angkor Wat, the Hohokam, the Maya, and the Inca. Mithen’s sources include archeological studies of ancient water management, and a variety of texts, such as administrative documents, poems, and histories. The case studies are encyclopedic, precise, and detailed. Nonetheless, the book’s travelogue style detracts from Mithen’s argument and contains undertones of orientalism. Mithen repeatedly devolves into irrelevant descriptions of his taxi rides or ruins tours. He tends to focus on either the magnificence of ancient structures or the peculiarity of ancient societies. In the conclusion to his chapter about Maya hydraulics, Mithen claims that the Maya are interesting because of their “monstrous acts” of human sacrifice and self-mutilation. This observation seems unrelated to his main point about water, and unnecessarily exoticizes the Maya by playing into stereotypes about their violent nature. In contrast, Mithen ends the chapter about the Roman world by describing his experience relaxing in a classically-inspired bath in Istanbul. This detail is not only trivial, but further idealizes the Roman state by glorifying its engineering feats. He doesn’t discuss how often such feats came at the expense of providing for the majority of the population.
The first word in the title is “thirst,” but we rarely get a sense of what it’s like to be thirsty in the ancient world because Mithen privileges state-sponsored projects that benefited the elite, and doesn’t explore water use among commoners. He writes primarily about elaborate water use among statesmen and nobles at well-known archeological sites (such as Machu Picchu) but seldom examines water use in the daily lives of the millions of ordinary subjects in ancient empires.
To his credit, Mithen does acknowledge that ancient rulers tended to overuse water in order to legitimize imperial authority. The extravagance of Roman baths, for instance, was a political statement about the power of the empire to provide for its subjects. In Angkor Wat, or the “hydraulic city,” large reservoirs may have been a tool of state propaganda and an attempt to recreate heaven on earth. Yet that is as far as Mithen goes. His reluctance to look away from the elites prevents him from achieving the goal implied by the book’s title–to understand the relationship between water and power in the ancient world . He sidesteps the relative powerlessness of most imperial subjects in ancient times, and the possibility that they were hurt by elite water management.
Admittedly, Mithen did face obstacles to this kind of analysis. Ancient sources are inherently biased towards elites whose sturdy water structures are more likely to be preserved than the substandard infrastructure, such as temporary pipes and makeshift canals, used by the poor. However, he makes no effort to fill in those gaps. For example, Mithen could have discussed the lack of in-home plumbing in most ancient Roman apartments, and the strategies that poor Romans used to deal with this issue. He also could have investigated soil samples and satellite imagery to understand water at smaller archeological sites. Perhaps he could have explained how dangerous waterborne bacteria were frequent sources of epidemic disease.
I recognize that my critique is from the perspective of the environmental justice movement, and examining inequality is not necessarily the point of the book. Still, Mithen’s glorification of state power and excessive focus on elites undermines its purpose as a resource for scientists and policymakers, and limits its relevance to the modern day. In Thirst’s conclusion, Mithen offers six lessons for the future: hold accountable those who control your water supply, cut down trees at your own peril, remember that cities use lots of water, value local knowledge about the water supply, do not waste water, and work with nature, not against it. None of these directly address the pressing issue of modern water inequality: What do we do about the massive differentials between developed and developing nations in both access to water and susceptibility to water disasters? Despite its strengths, Mithin’s characterization of ancient hydraulic management in Thirst is too narrow to help us address the contemporary environmental crisis.