The Noria Revolution
The introduction of the noria in any district has always had revolutionary consequences upon agricultural productivity. If introduced into an area where river irrigation has been practiced for example, Ptolemaic Egypt , it lessens the dependence of gravity-flow canals on fluctuations in the level of the river the Nile, in the case of Egypt by using nongeared, water-driven wheels to raise the water. 52 The geared wheel, moved by harnessing animal traction to it, may have an even more dramatic...
The Collapse of the Visigothic State and the Islamic Conquest
The Visigothic state which the Muslims found such an easy victim was an ethnically stratified society, with a fragmented political structure, a depressed and unbalanced rural economy, and a town life which was rudimentary at best. These Goths who also called themselves Thervings, or 28 People of the Woods were a herding people who, entering the peninsula in the early sixth century, tended to settle in areas ecologically suited to their traditional economic pursuits. Thus the greatest...
Culture Contact and the Polemic of Spanish Historiography
Spaniards have, of course, been aware since the middle ages that many traits of their culture were acquired from the Muslims. They knew this 7 because of the formalized continuity of certain customary arrangements, exemplified in repeated legal strictures that these were to continue as was the custom in the time of the Moors. A large number of words in the peninsular Romance tongues were easily recognized as Arabisms, and popular diffusionist notions attributed a Moorish origin to a wide...
Christian Acknowledgments
This project was suggested to me by Professor John H. Parry, who encouraged me to pursue a comparative approach. Originally this book was to appear in a multi-volumed history of Spain in English. Under the auspices of Ediciones Grijalbo the series continues in Spanish, where this volume will appear next to those on the later middle ages by Jocelyn Hillgarth, whose encouragement and advice were significant in the elaboration of my own view of Spanish culture. The entire volume was read in...