Insight Guides Pocket Sri Lanka (Travel Guide eBook) by Insight Guides
Author:Insight Guides
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Sri Lanka
Publisher: Apa Publications
Published: 2019-05-01T16:00:00+00:00
The trio of lakes which surround Anuradhapura are just three of the thousands of man-made reservoirs – or ‘tanks’ (wewas) – that dot Sri Lanka’s northern plains. Early Sinhalese civilisation was agricultural, and the lack of regular rainfall in the northern dry zone meant that the storage and distribution of water from the region’s few dependable rivers or collected during the brief monsoon, was crucial. The island’s first reservoirs and irrigation channels date from the earliest days of Sinhalese settlement, but it was between the 3rd and 7th centuries AD that the vast system of tanks was linked by thousands of miles of irrigation channels in one of the greatest hydraulic achievements the world has seen. Over time, the maintenance of these systems began to place an untenable burden on the population and as waves of Tamil invaders harassed the north, they fell into disarray. Gradually, the water supply failed and the Sinhalese decamped, abandoning the northern plains and moving towards the less arid lands further south.
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