History
People have lived on the Kura for at least 7,000 years? The ancient inhabitants of the Kura-Aras lowland called the river Mother Kür, signifying the importance of the river to the region. The first irrigation agriculture began about 4,500 years ago in the eastern Azerbaijan lowlands. Trading centers were established in time, including one at Mingachevir in Azerbaijan and another at Mtskheta in Georgia.
The site at Mingachevir (probably Sudagylan), first discovered in the 1940s by archaeologist G.I. Ione, had "seven rectangular kilns … The fuel chamber was trapezoid. The inner walls and floor were covered with a special coating. These kilns were attributed to the third century B.C. . The number of kilns and the quantity of raw material indicate a trade center." The settlement was probably destroyed by a fire around A.D. 600, but its demise is uncertain. But perhaps most famous of the ancient settlements on the Kura is the "cave town" at Uplistsikhe, Georgia, first settled as early as 3,500 years ago. The city, carved into a cliff on the bank of the Kura covering an area of 8 hectares (20 acres), contains underground living quarters, communal chambers, places of worship, storerooms, connected by a network of passageways. It reached its peak about 1,100 years ago as the political, religious and cultural center of the region, but in the 13th century, it fell to Mongolian invaders.
Even though irrigation agriculture had been well established for thousands of years, until the 1920s, humans did not have a significant effect on the ecology or hydrology of the Kura River watershed. Since then, logging, grazing and especially agriculture began to have a severe outcome on the water availability of the basin. Many forested areas in the mountains have been replaced by thin grassland because of logging. These habitat changes have been detrimental to the ecology of the Kura basin. After the 1920s, wetlands were drained and reservoirs were created to facilitate development of irrigation in the lower Kura valley.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when the Caucasus region was part of the Soviet Union, construction of many of the reservoirs and waterworks in the Kura basin began. Of the major reservoirs in the Kura catchment, one of the earliest was at Varvara in 1952. Large scale construction of dams continued until the 1970s.
Read more about this topic: Kura River
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