qanats

Water usage continued to develop in the East with the building of water systems called qanats by the Persians—elaborate tunnels that sometimes transported water for miles and miles to walled cities.

Flushed W. Hodding Carter 2006

Water usage continued to develop in the East with the building of water systems called qanats by the Persians—elaborate tunnels that sometimes transported water for miles and miles to walled cities.

Flushed W. Hodding Carter 2006

Horizontal means of groundwater extraction are called infiltration galleries and their forms vary from ditches open at the top to tunnels completely underground (the famous "qanats" or qarrez ", commonly seen in Iran or Pakistan, are examples of infiltration galleries).

6. Water sources, their protection and development 1992

See Zhob District Gazetteer, pp. 165 – 6, for Ghalzi Pashtun nomads as excavators of qanats or underground irrigation channels, and Balland, p. 209 (footnote), quoting another source about the class of nomads who entered the subcontinent for seasonal labor opportunities such as "stone-breaking, road-making, clearing jungle (butimari), and any sort of job where energy and strength are more necessary than professional skills."

Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier 2008

It's the Iranian pride and joy: a great network of qanats, or underground canals, which bring water from the mountains to wherever it is needed. for thousands of years, people have been building and maintaining these things, allowing cities to flourish in the desert and do things like grow rice in arid wastelands.

Eric Lurio: Notes on the Iran/Persia Conflict: A Travelogue -- Part Three 2009

But by the time Joshka Wessels arrived in Qara, some 60 miles northeast of Damascus, in 2004, its ancient qanats were in ruins.

Cool, Clear Water 2007

More than 1,500 years earlier, residents had dug stonelined aqueducts — qanats — deep below the arid ground.

Cool, Clear Water 2007

However, sometimes they fed an underground cistern, usually dug out of rock, that supplied drinking water in the dry environment where most of the qanats were built.

Flushed W. Hodding Carter 2006

In most cases the qanats branched off into aboveground canals that irrigated local crops.

Flushed W. Hodding Carter 2006

In North Africa, ancient qanats still deliver water to villages.

Flushed W. Hodding Carter 2006