They could not lose. Resistance movements started. They would take over places like this and opened the sluice gate allowing the water to pour back down into Owens Valley. Irregularly they dynamited the aqueduct. But the city rebuilt it and the game...
Today we take our control of water for granted. Modern civilization couldn't exist without it. But there is still only a finite amount of water to go around. In many parts of the world, scarcity has led to a bitter struggle for control over the avail...
But as it grew, the Khmer Kingdom faced the stumbling block. When the monsoon finished each year, the fish and water would vanish. So each year, the inhabitants were plunged into drought and hunger. The Khmer rules off the challenge magnificently. Th...
And this was their greatest achievement: the legendary temple complex of Angkor. You know, a real sense of age of this place here. This was built over 1,200 years ago. At a few places right here you can see a show of the age that faces are all worn,...
It's just magic. When you follow it, you can see that this is the perfect union of the tree and the villages. The locals have kind of trained the roots, kind of guided them through and netted them together. What they've done here is they've grabbed s...
The key was adaptation. Rain. A familiar occurrence in many parts of the world. But this is rain at its most extreme, the monsoon. The significance of the monsoon isn't the human discomfort, but how the people here have learned to live with it. I'm t...
But the human's struggle to pin down water is forever balanced on a knife edge. Get that balance wrong, and you pay the price. For all their ingenuity, the Garamantes over-exploited their ground water. Eventually, it ran out, and so did their civiliz...
society, that first brought civilization to the desert. Far from just scraping by in this harsh landscape, the Garamantes were flourishing. They grew crops, such as cereals and grapes. They kept horses and pigs. Clearly, they needed large amounts of...
So the rigid hierarchical structure of Egyptian society wasn't just dictated by the Pharaohs. It also emerged because the Egyptians had only one water source - the Nile. 5,000 years ago, it wasn't just the ancient Egyptians who noticed the value of r...
It worked because the water of the river carried something special within it, an almost invisible treasure that was the secret of Egypts economic might. What made Egypt great is this stuff - silt. It's a rich supermineral silt, it's like an expresso,...
