Event

Emily Hammer, Assistant Professor at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania will give a talk discussing the water situation in the Middle East from both a contemporary and historic perspective. 

The Middle East is an arid region facing major water problems, but it is also a region that thousands of years ago hosted the world's earliest cities and states. How did the Middle East go from being the "cradle of civilization" to a region on the edge of water crises? This talk discusses archaeological and athropological evidence for how water avilability has changed over the millennia in the Middle East through the interaction of natural systems and human management.