Dale J. Stahl's "Two Rivers Entangled"

Dale J. Stahl is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Two Rivers Entangled: An Ecological History of the Tigris and Euphrates in the Twentieth Century, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Two Rivers Entangled, you will find a map of the dams along the Euphrates River in Syria and Turkey with their opening dates. Only two reservoirs appear, those behind the first big dams: the al-Tabqa Dam in Syria (1973) and the Keban Dam in Turkey (1974). The rest of the river is depicted as a sinuous, free-flowing line making its way southeast off the map toward Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

Page 99 gives a surprisingly good sense of the book. The map visually illustrates the change at the heart of the story: the damming of the Euphrates River and its transformation into a series of reservoirs. By the mid-1990s, “a traveler with exceptionally long legs could step from one dam’s reservoir to another, walking down a set of watery steps…to the plains and deserts” (136). The map shows the beginning of this process in the mid-1970s, while additional notations indicate where future dams would be built.

The map also specifies the dams’ “opening dates” as opposed to completion, which gestures toward a central question of the book: who or what changes our world? Histories of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey have usually focused on human actors—kings, presidents, and high commissioners, or social groups like unions, religious orders, or political parties. Two Rivers Entangled places the ecologies of the Tigris and Euphrates back inside histories of state-building, revolution, economic development, and geopolitics. Focusing on ecological factors—water, salt, and rock—shows the limits of human-centered histories. Keban Dam, for example, wasn’t really finished in 1974: it leaked so badly the project took another ten years to complete. Another dam on the Tigris at Mosul requires regular infusions of concrete to remain standing.

So, page 99 passes the test. It visually represents the book’s subject and hints at its larger meaning: while historical narratives often reassure us that technology will eventually master the natural world, a closer accounting shows the limits of human control, not only over a river but also over the stories we tell about it.

Visit Dale J. Stahl's website.

--Marshal Zeringue