The qanats, one of the greatest inventions of mankind

The qanats are an ever-returning and ever-fascinating subject of discussion.

[Picture from klikabol.com]

It is a water supply system that transports water from underground reserves to irrigation canals and even to cities. The qanats are a valuable asset in desert regions. They are known all over the world, from North Africa to Asia, Arabia, the Mediterranean countries such as Spain, Italy, and Greece, and even in the Nazca Valley of Peru and Chile!

My first encounter happened in Libya, where I was introduced to the Garamantes, who used this water supply system. It is still visible in the Sahara desert, although the local Berbers called it foggaras (see: Could Alexander have known the Garamantes?). It is impossible to trace its origins back and we don’t know who really invented the system or implemented it first. Persia seems to be a good candidate, and it may have traveled from there over the Silk Road.

Since Libya, I did indeed come across repeated qanats all over Iran. According to the statistics, approximately 50,000 such qanats were still working in Iran last century. In Afghanistan, about 20,000 qanats were still in use at that time.

With the climate change that is affecting our daily use and need for water, the qanats regain their importance. Although the concept is rather simple, it does require regular maintenance. Over the centuries, the local tribes and chiefs were in charge of keeping the system in working order. However, modern construction projects such as cities and barrages on existing rivers often disrupt and/or interrupt the water supply. Since those projects are overseen by a governmental institution, little attention is given to this centuries-old supply system on which many local populations still rely. In the process, small communities lose their only access to water. They cannot raise their crops and lack water for their own basic needs.

In northeastern Iran, the qanats of Gonabac are among the world's oldest and largest. Their origin seems to go back to 700-500 BC, to the days of the Achaemenid kings. My question about Alexander getting his knowledge from the Garamantes in Libya is obviously outdated. The hydraulic system existed way before he arrived in Persia, but he must have seen it at work.

Once you know what to look for, the scars in the landscape are unmistakably clear. The vertical openings reaching down to the horizontal underground aqueduct appear like a string of pearls. Heaps of soil around the shafts are the visible traces of these access columns. For the maintenance operation, men were lowered down those shafts, and each one would clear a section of the horizontal water flow at the bottom. These shafts also functioned as wells and contributed to the ventilation along the route. The water comes from a faraway source, often in the mountains. Gravity carries it through these man-made tunnels. An additional advantage is that these underground conduits significantly reduce the evaporation of the water in the hot desert climate.

The Gonabac complex runs over a total length of 33 kilometers and has 427 wells. The structure has nothing to envy our modern knowledge of geology and hydraulics. After 2700 years, the qanats are still working! Quite an amazing achievement, that teaches us a precious lesson, doesn’t it?

In this context, a previous post on water management may be interesting reading as well (see: Water management in antiquity).

Water management in antiquity

Water management is a modern word for something that exists since early antiquity.

We tend to think of the Romans as being the first to bring water where it was needed thanks to the ingenuity and the skills of their architects since they left us a great number of aqueducts and fountains, but they certainly were not the first to “manage” water.

Other civilizations in other climates had to rely on other techniques and other resources. One such system is known as the kareez or qanats, which were first mentioned to me in Libya. There the ancient people of Garamantes, a Berber population that prospered from about 500 BC to 700 AD, used this technique locally known as “foggaras”. It consists of a network of underground tunnels with shafts by which fossil water is led to the desert surface creating sudden magic fertile lands and oasis.

The idea sounded rather abstract till I came across a similar system near the city of Nurata, roughly north between Bukhara and Samarkand in Uzbekistan. At the foot of the Nurata fort (Nur in antiquity) is a holy mosque that boasts about its sacred waters that come from the distant hills through a system of qanats. Here, the qanat is an underground tunnel that slopes gently and transports water from a spot under a distant hill to the lower lands; it is punctuated with a series of vertical access shafts at set intervals through which the channel could be cleaned. (See: The qanats, one of the greatest inventions of mankind)

More recently, I was told that it was, in fact, an ancient Persian invention or maybe even older, since similar waterworks were mentioned in Sumerian and Assyrian documents, i.e., at least one thousand years earlier. Yet the invention is generally attributed to the Iranians at some time during the first millennium BC, who heavily relied on the qanats until the middle of the 20^th century. When I was recently in Iran, I was shown a succession of heaps of stones which were the shaft’s entries into the underground channel. Unfortunately, all I saw were these mounds, merely oversized anthills, not a real illustration of this ingenious system.

Striking, however, were the so-called yakhchal or ice pits, which are clearly visible above ground in Iran, like this one on the road between Shiraz and Yazd. The system, said to have been mastered around 400 BC (just before Alexander’s arrival!), is quite sophisticated, as clearly explained in Wikipedia: “they built a wall in the east–west direction near the yakhchal (ice pit). In winter, the qanat water would be channelled to the north side of the wall, whose shade made the water freeze more quickly, increasing the ice formed per winter day. Then the ice was stored in yakhchals — specially designed, naturally cooled refrigerators. A large underground space with thick insulated walls was connected to a qanat, and a system of windcatchers or wind towers was used to draw cool subterranean air up from the qanat to maintain temperatures inside the space at low levels, even during hot summer days. As a result, the ice melted slowly and was available year-round”.

On another front, the water supply system of Petra in Jordan is at present under close scrutiny. The attentive visitor walking through the narrow canyon (Siq) to the heart of the city will automatically notice the water channels at the elbow’s height following the contours of the side walls, interrupted by shallow holes meant to filter the water. Yet the entire landscape around Petra is littered with smaller and larger cisterns using the natural slope of the rock walls and the cracks in the cliffs. I was taken to such a cistern from Nabataean times on the road to Little Petra, nothing more than a square door in a huge rock wall. A narrow staircase led me down into the dark water reservoir, and I could only guess its depth. In its glory days, it is said to hold as much as 1.2 million liters – how can I size that up? Today’s water level is much lower, but the precious water is still being used to irrigate the Bedouin crops in the surrounding fields and to water the animals.

It is rather unusual to encounter a water problem high up the El Deir Temple at Petra, also known as the Monastery. (see: Hellenistic Petra, indirect heritage of Alexander). Where it stands, El Deir always takes the full brunt of any storm that rolls in from across the desert. Besides, this monument is not cut deep enough into the soft sandstone wall and leaves the façade very exposed.

In front of  El Deir, there used to be a catch pool designed to collect the water from occasional downpours, but at present, the very entrance to this pool is obstructed by rubble and soil that accumulated over the centuries. Storms, when they occur, are rather violent and turn into torrents of fast-moving water that create puddles at the base of the façade. Today, the flash floods hit the monument from all sides, and water stagnates at the base of El Deir, whose walls absorb salt and other minerals from the soil, leaving a crystallized crust on the stone's surface. This crust weakens the stone and eventually will lead to its destruction. The Nabataeans clearly were aware of the problem and built that wall with the catch pool. Archaeologists now realize that the reconstruction of this wall is a priority.

Evidently, water is not always where we need it and is not always available in the appropriate amount. Another part of the archaeological project at El Deir aims to clear out dozens of water channels and cisterns in order to restore the Nabataeans’ efficient water management. At the same time, the current inhabitants could profit from the precious water, and this efficient system could eventually serve other desert communities.

Water management is nothing new, and it is quite amazing that in our advanced 21^st century, we can still learn so much from our forefathers! 

Could Alexander have known the Garamantes?

It never ceases to amaze me how much people in antiquity knew about other civilizations far beyond their own borders and apparent areas of communication. We in Western Europe like to keep our attention centered around the Mediterranean countries, where we are aware of seafarers crossing back and forth for eons. We need to learn more about what the Persians, with their repeated invasions, added to our daily lives. Still, we definitely know that Alexander the Great opened up the Eastern world to us as much as he brought Asia in touch with our civilization, which all contributed to what went down in history as Hellenistic.

When I visited the Archaeological Museum of Tripoli in Libya, my guide pointed proudly towards (primarily copies of) petroglyphs from the Libyan Desert made by the Garamantes. They lived in the Fezzan area in the southern Sahara, where they created their own kingdom. It was a Berber population that prospered from about 500 BC to 700 AD, mainly because of their clever building of "foggaras," i.e., a network of underground tunnels and shafts by which fossil water was led to the desert surface from a limestone layer buried deep under the desert sands, which in the process created fertile lands and oases.

The Garamantes are mentioned for the first time by Herodotus. He describes them as a great nation that herded cattle, farmed dates, and hunted the Ethiopians from four-horse chariots. Tacitus talks about their raids on Roman settlements along the coast, while Pliny the Elder reports that 15 settlements were captured by his countrymen in 19 BC. How exactly this Garamantian Kingdom declined is still being determined. Still, it was probably connected to a change in climatic conditions and/or the overuse of their groundwater since fossil water is a non-renewable resource (precisely what is happening now with the Great Manmade River project in Libya).

So, when I heard the name Garamantes in Libya, it only had a familiar faraway resonance, but I don't remember whether anything was said about this marvelous water management. Since I was neither interested in rock art nor in the prehistoric history of Libya, I paid no further attention to this information till last week when I saw a program on TV about the strange shafts still visible in the Sahara desert landscape, remains of said foggaras (a name given by the local Berbers). The program went into some detail about their ingenious concept and complex construction (see diagram from Wikipedia)

[photo Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Qanat_cross_section.svg]

They made it appear as something entirely unique, as if the Garamantes had invented the principle. At this stage, Alexander came to my mind.

Recently, I traveled to Uzbekistan, where I stopped at a fort built by Alexander the Great near today's city of Nurata, roughly north between Bukhara and Samarkand. At the foot of this fort was a holy mosque that boasted about its sacred waters that came from the distant hills through a system of kareez or qanats, as the Arabs call them. I was told it was Alexander the Great's doing (or his engineers, most probably). Of course, I was entirely flabbergasted, for I had never heard of this Alexander fort and even less about his laying out such an intricate and sophisticated water system without which the oasis of Nur (modern Nurata) could not have flourished.

In light of the TV program, my immediate question now was: could Alexander have known about the foggaras in the Libyan Desert? Nothing is impossible, of course, but he had never been further west than the Egyptian/Libyan desert on his way to Siwah. Could he have picked up this tale during that trip, or was one of his engineers familiar with the system? Or is the story here in Nur only a legend lost in time and conveniently connected to Alexander? Quite an exciting discovery, as far as I'm concerned!

I tried to find out more about the subject. In the process, I discovered that this system is known worldwide, from North Africa to Asia, Arabia, the Mediterranean countries such as Spain, Italy, and Greece, and even in the Nazca Valley of Peru and Chile! It goes by many different names according to the country or civilization throughout the centuries. The Persian word is kariz or kareez, which is still used in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the countries of Central Asia, like Uzbekistan; in Morocco, it is called khettara; in Spain, galleria, in Arabia falaj, and in North Africa, foggara or fughara. It is also known as kakuriz, chin-avulz, or mayun, while qanats may be spelled in different ways as kanat, khanat, kunut, kona, konait, ghanat, ghundat. Pick your choice.

But whatever the name, the origin of the entire system has not been traced to any particular location. However, Persia is the area from where it probably traveled over the Silk Road across the Eurasian continent. I'm pretty amazed to read that in the last century, there were approximately 20,000 qanats still in use in Afghanistan and about 50,000 in Iran.

[Image courtesy U. Leicester/DigitalGlobe/Google]

To add some livelihood to my astonishment, I found an article on the subject in National Geographic (Nov 2011) – although not directly. It so happened that images of more than one hundred "lost" fortresses were seen on new satellite photographs taken over the Libyan desert. These castles seem to belong to the Garamantes, a civilization National Geographic places between the 2nd and the 7th century AD. Researchers have discovered walled towns, villages, and farms thanks to these views. An early 2011 expedition found remarkably well-preserved brick walls standing up to 3-4 meters high, which previously had been erroneously attributed to Roman frontier forts. Their investigation led further to these underground canals, which enabled the Garamantes to cultivate crops such as wheat, barley, figs, grapes, sorghum, pearl millet, and even cotton!

What a fantastic world out there!

The above information has been updated in the post The qanats, one of the greatest inventions of mankind.