Water · a Light

The water wheel came west and left its words behind

Two machines raised water from Iran to Spain. The saqiya is a chain of pots turned by an ox through right angled gearing. The noria is a wheel with pots on its rim, driven by the current of the river itself and needing no animal at all. Seventeen of them still stand at Hama on the Orontes in Syria, the largest about twenty metres across, and they groan as they turn. They were not new in the Islamic period: a mosaic at Apamea, dated 469, already shows one. What the Muslim centuries added was their spread and the law of water shares that went with them, measured in time rather than volume. The words travelled too. Spanish noria is na'ura and acequia is al-saqiya, and irrigation ditches in New Mexico are still called acequias and still run by their own elected associations.

Norias of Hama · Apamea mosaic, 469 CE