The Waterways of Arabistan (Khuzestan) in Lorimer’s Gazetteer
By Everett Pruitt
In the work that we know as Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, the various compilers of information about the region rely on various geographic reference points to situate locations. In their description of Arabistan, now Khuzestan Province in Iran, they rely heavily on canals and rivers as the main geographic reference points. An example of this can be found in the entry on the Karun River, in which the locations of riverside villages are measured in “[m]iles by river below Band-i-Qīr and on which bank [they are] situated” with the relevant data organized tabularly in the source. This reliance on canals and rivers in Arabistan poses a problem to researchers attempting to reconstruct geographic information in Lorimer due to the lack of continuity between the waterways of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the landscape of contemporary Khuzestan.
OpenGulf links the geographic entities found in Lorimer’s Gazetteer to the unique IDs found in GeoNames an open source geographical database founded in 2005. As such, the geographic data has been generated in the last 15 years. This is not nearly enough time to reflect the totality of the changes that have taken place in the last century in Khuzestan, including natural erosion and changes in rivers as well as the acceleration of environmental change in the region due to agricultural and environmental policies in the region.
Environmental policy has caused changes in the region, causing some rivers and canals to shift and for some to run dry. The creation of dams in Iran, and upstream in Turkey, has altered the courses and dried up segment of the Dez and Karun rivers and their tributaries and canals. Shifts in the agricultural focus of the region have also altered the waterways and canals. Initially an American policy in Iran, sugarcane production was introduced to Khuzestan in the 1950s and accelerated after the Iran-Iraq War in the 1990s. Sugarcane is not native to the region and its cultivation has caused severe damage to the local environment, consuming high amounts of water, with the change of crop alone (assuming the same amount of land for cultivation) is around. This estimate does not include the expansion of the area under cultivation or any other changes, such as moving from seasonal and rain based farming. All of these shifts have caused waterways to dry up and spurred alterations to canals and irrigation systems. Finally, cities in Khuzestan are often ignored in favor of bigger cities by the government, leaving it to become polluted and underdeveloped, with water being redirected from it to the more populous Isfahan and Tehran, again drying up rivers and canals. At the time of writing, the population of Khuzestan are protesting the lack of water in the region due to all the aforementioned reasons, notably the dams, redirection, and subsequent lack of water. The Jarrahi and Karakha rivers are at the cusp of drying up entirely (and smaller tributaries already have). The Iranian (and Turkish) policies, in addition to the natural shifts in rivers due to erosion, have altered the waterways of Khuzestan, rendering the decision making process around locating geographic reference points in the early twentieth-century Gazetteer fluid at best. While I have not been able to discern if the changes I have seen are natural or caused by the drastic changes to the region, it is important to keep both in mind.
Figure 1: Two maps illustrating an attempt to plot riverside settlements along the Gargar River (left) along 21 miles using the data from the Gazetteer, with a closeup view of the Gargar River near the city of Sufan.
Before discussing some of the evidence of the shifts in the Gargar river, I want to explain how I find locations on rivers like it. Using my best estimate for the starting point provided in Lorimer, in this case the edge of Shushtar city, I trace the river from the point using Google Maps’ “measure distance” tool, making sure that my version follows the river closely and never deviates from its path. This creates a copy of the river with distances marked alongside it. The text gives locations as City X, distance Y on the Gargar from the end of Shushtar, and the bank. It is not clear where the authors get this information from or how accurate it is intended to be, however distances are given to the nearest quarter mile, implying some degree of accuracy in the initial estimations. This easily converts to the river once the distances have been mapped to it. This method does bring with it some ambiguities, mainly the issues of the river’s movement and the necessary estimation of the starting point. Both of these issues are hard to counteract as we simply do not know exactly where cities stopped and where rivers were a century ago.
INTERACTIVE MAP OF ARABISTAN FORTHCOMING
In the above map, it is clear that the locations provided are no longer accurate. The Gargar is a 100 km artificial branch of the Karun created to irrigate the land south of Shushtar. By comparing modern locations on the Gargar to the locations in Lorimer we see that the Gargar has likely changed in the area south of Chahār Gāveh (Lorimer’s Chahārgāweh) as the locations of the six cities are offset from the locations given in Lorimer by significant distances. This is likely due to the natural shift in the river’s course over the last century and also the variable degree of accuracy we can attribute to the Gazetteer and exemplifies the challenges of using century-old geospatial data.
Does this render the geographic data in Lorimer on Arabistan and other regions that use a river-based reference system incongruent with contemporary geographic information? No. Some locations, primarily those that are only located through descriptions of rivers and canals, are impossible to find without an up to date name or a second reference point. However, well documented cities and towns with consistent names are easy to locate. Regardless, the environmental changes in Khuzestan point to how changes in the environment affect historical geographic information and the importance of understanding environmental history when modernizing geographic data from the near past.