14 Facts About Sawad

Sawad was the name used in early Islamic times for southern Iraq.

Enormous economic potential of the Sawad is reflected in early Abbasid revenue lists: the Sawad produced four times as much tax revenue as the second-highest-producing province, Egypt, and five times as much as Syria and Palestine combined.

Sawad spent huge sums of money to finance the restoration of the systems, but in vain.

Lands of the Sawad were among the most fertile in the Islamic world, but this productivity was almost totally dependent on artificial irrigation: dry farming requires 200 mm of rainfall per year, an amount reached in almost nowhere in the Sawad.

At its apex under the late Sasanian period, the irrigation system of the Sawad must have diverted virtually the entire flow of both the Tigris and Euphrates to agricultural purposes.

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Techniques used by farmers in the medieval Sawad were mostly the same as those used by twentieth-century Iraqi farmers.

The rice plantations around Jamida, as described by Qadi Tanukhi, constituted some of the richest rice-producing areas in the Sawad, which enticed government officials to compete for the control of the region.

In much of the Sawad, the date was a crucial crop, almost as important as cereals like wheat, barley, and rice.

Sawad described ten different specific varieties of fig, with varying size, taste, and color.

Abu Yusuf condemned the injustices against taxpayers in the Sawad, saying that tax farmers were breaking the law for their own financial benefit.

Sawad said that they "rob the taxpayer by imposing on them taxes they do not owe and punish them in repulsive ways to secure their own profit".

Sawad said that isolated, independently standing houses were best, but if space was tight then they could be built adjoining each other as long as the necessary ventilation was provided.

Sawad stressed the necessity of a blacksmith, carpenter, and potter in each village to supply residents with everyday items or building materials.

Sawad said that these practices should be abolished and prescribed that drinking water should instead be provided by being collected on clean roofs of houses, and then directed down the sides of the houses into a cistern by wooden gutters.