The Watermills of Mosul in the Ottoman Period

This paper presents a documentary and archaeological study of the watermills in Ottoman Mosul to gain a political and social-economic understanding of the water resource management in Mosul and its north-eastern hinterland in the early modern period. As an inanimate subject of history, watermills may provide us with significant clues for teasing out various strands of the water resource management and agricultural economies from a regional and longe-dureé perspective. By synthesizing two different methodological viewpoints, history and archeology, this paper aims to address the questions of what kind of legacy the Ottoman rule inherited regarding the water infrastructure in Mosul and how it shaped the development of Mosul’s water infrastructure, including watermills and irrigation systems. It presents an archaeological examination of a group of milling installations in Wadi Bandawai in the north of Mosul, demonstrating changes in settlement patterns during the long Islamic period, from the 7th to early 20th centuries, and also drawing attention to methodological problems with Islamic and Ottoman archaeology concerning the periodization of material culture.