Qanat Trivia

Building a Better Qanat In the Sahara, they're called foggara, and considered a romantic mystery. They were made by menbut which men, and when, has been forgotten by the Berber Arabs of north Africa; this is a piece of their history which they have lost. Their origin is unknown. And yet the foggara still exist, they still do the work they were made to do. All lie underground. They all run downhill. Some lie several hundred feet beneath the sand dunes, and some run several hundred miles from source to outlet. Others are only a few feet down, and some have undoubtedly fallen into ruin, and been swallowed up by the desert. They are all very old, certainly. They are rivers, but artificial ones. They are buried watercourses crossing the desert. In Berber Arabic, the word for them is foggara; in Turkish, qanat; in Persian, qarez. In the Sahara, they're a mystery. But they can be found elsewhere, spread across a vast portion of inner Asia: in Iran, in Iraq, in Turkey, in Afghanistan and the USSR, and in Sinkiang province of China. They're a piece of ancient technology still being used today. They probably came before aqueducts, and have certainly outlasted them, but their purpose is exactly the same: to carry water. This is how qanats were being built by Iranian peasants in the 1950's: First, you need a man with money to invest. Qanats are a good, sound investment: a well-made qanat can be used by many families ...