Historical and Geographical Overviews of the Euphrates-Tigris and the Orontes Basins

Water has played an important role in the household, economic (agricultural) and military spheres in the Ottoman Empire and water issues have been in the spotlight of the authorities, which continues hitherto in the modern Republic of Turkey. The Ottoman Empire has faced a number of water challenges (supply of drinking water to cities, providing farmers with irrigation water and so on), and therefore began to build aqueducts, canal systems, cisterns, public fountainsand so on. But they weren’t large storage water structures, with only some exceptions in Istanbul.