A sāqiyah or saqiya (), also spelled sakia or saqia) is a mechanical water lifting device. It is also called a Persian wheel, tablia, rehat, and in Latin tympanum.
The sāqiyah is still used in India, Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, and in the Iberian Peninsula and the Balearic Islands. It may have been invented in Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, Iran, Kush or India. The sāqiyah was mainly used for irrigation, but not exclusively, as the example of Qusayr 'Amra shows, where it was used at least in part to provide water for a royal bathhouse.
Name and meaning
Etymology and related meanings
The Arabic word
saqiya () is derived from the root verb
saqa (), meaning to "give to drink" or "make (someone/something) drink".
From this, the word
saqiya (often transliterated as
seguia in
Morocco or the
Maghreb) has the sense of "one that gives water" or "irrigator". Its general meaning is to denote a water channel for irrigation or for city water supplies, but by extension it applies to a device which provides water for such irrigation.
Likewise,
Spanish language acequia, derived from the same word, is used to denote an irrigation canal or water channel in Spain.
In the Maghreb and Morocco, the related word
saqqaya () also denotes a public fountain where residents could take water (similar in function to a
sabil).
[El Khammar, Abdeltif (2005). "Mosquées et oratoires de Meknès (IXe-XVIIIe siècle) : géographie religieuse, architecture et problème de la Qibla". PhD Thesis. Université Lumière-Lyon 2.]
The English term
Persian wheel is first attested in the 17th century (but in the earliest case for a water-driven wheel).
Saqiya versus noria
The term
saqiyah or
saqiya is the usual term for water-raising devices powered by animals.
The term
noria is commonly used for devices which use the power of moving water to turn the wheel instead.
Other types of similar devices are grouped under the name of
Chain pump. A
noria in contrast uses the water power obtained from the flow of a river. The noria consists of a large
Undershot wheel whose rim is made up of a series of containers which lift water from the river to an aqueduct at the top of the wheel.
Some famous examples are the norias of Hama in
Syria or the
Albolafia noria in Cordoba,
Spain.
However, the names of traditional water-raising devices used in the Middle East, India, Spain and other areas are often used loosely and overlappingly, or vary depending on region. Ismail al-Jazari's famous book on mechanical devices, for example, groups the water-driven wheel and several other types of water-lifting devices under the general term saqiya.
Description
With buckets directly on the wheel
The saqiya is a large hollow wheel, traditionally made of wood. One type has its clay pots or buckets attached directly to the periphery of the wheel, which limits the depth it can scoop water from to less than half its diameter. The modern version also known as
zawaffa or
jhallan is normally made of galvanized sheet steel and consists of a series of scoops. The modern type dispenses the water near the hub rather than from the top, the opposite of the traditional types. These devices were in widespread use in China, India, Pakistan, Syria and Egypt.
Saqiya wheels range in diameter from two to five metres. Though traditionally driven by Working animal, they are also attached to an engine or electric motor. While animal-driven saqiyas can rotate at 2–4 rpm, motorised ones can make as much as 8–15 rpm. Formerly hundreds of thousands were in use in the Nile valley and delta.
With buckets attached to endless belt
The historical Middle-Eastern device known in Arabic as
saqiya usually had its buckets attached to a double chain, creating a so-called "pot garland". This allowed scooping water out of a much deeper well.
An animal-driven saqiya can raise water from 10 to 20 metres depth, and is thus considerably more efficient than a swape or shadoof, as it is known in Arabic, which can only pump water from 3 metres.
Spanish type also wind-powered
In Spanish an animal-driven saqiya is named aceña, with the exception of the Cartagena area, where it is called a noria de sangre, or "waterwheel of blood". There is also a much rarer type of saqiya which is driven by wind.
History
Kingdom of Kush
The saqiya was known in Meroitic Nubia (Kingdom of Kush) from the 3rd century BC, where it was known as
Kolē.
The
Nubia used the saqiya to improve irrigation during the
Meroitic period. The introduction of this machine had a decisive influence on agriculture as this wheel lifted water 3 to 8 metres with much less labour force and time than the
Shaduf, which was the previous irrigation device in the Kingdom. The Shaduf relied on human energy while the saqiya was driven by buffalos or other animals.
India
The sāqiyah might, according to Ananda Coomaraswamy, have been invented in India, where the earliest reference to it is found in the
Panchatantra (c. 3rd century BCE), where it was known as an
araghaṭṭa;
which is a combination or the words
ara (speedy or a spokedwheel) and
ghaṭṭa "pot"
in
Sanskrit. That device was either used like a sāqiyah, to lift water from a well while being powered by oxen or people, or it was used to
irrigation fields when it was powered in the manner of a water-wheel by being placed in a stream or large irrigation channel. In the latter case we usually speak of a noria as opposed to a sāqiyah.
In Ranjit Sitaram Pandit's translation of Kalhana's 12th century chronicle Rajatarangini, this mechanism is alluded to when describing a yantra used for drawing water from a well.
Egypt
Paddle-driven water-lifting wheels had appeared in ancient Egypt by the 4th century BCE.
According to John Peter Oleson, both the compartmented wheel and the hydraulic noria appeared in
Egypt by the 4th century BCE, with the saqiya being invented there a century later. This is supported by archeological finds at
Faiyum, where the oldest archeological evidence of a
water wheel has been found, in the form of a saqiya dating back to the 3rd century BCE. A
papyrus dating to the 2nd century BCE also found in Faiyum mentions a water wheel used for irrigation, a 2nd-century BC
fresco found at
Alexandria depicts a compartmented saqiya, and the writings of Callixenus of Rhodes mention the use of a saqiya in the Ptolemaic Kingdom during the reign of Ptolemy IV Philopator in the late 3rd century BCE.
Early Mediterranean evidence of a saqiya is from a tomb painting in Ptolemaic Egypt that dates to the 2nd century BCE. It shows a pair of yoked oxen driving a compartmented waterwheel. The saqiya gear system is already shown fully developed to the point that "modern Egyptian devices are virtually identical".
The saqiya was sufficiently iconic in the Egyptian mind that a style of earring named after it was produced between the 1830s and 1950s, which is still worn today by enthusiasts and collectors of vintage Egyptian jewelry.
Roman Empire
Philo of Byzantium wrote of such a device in the 2nd century B.C.;
the historian
Vitruvius mentioned them around 30 B.C.; remains of tread wheel driven, bucket chains, dating from the 2nd century B.C., have been found in baths at
Pompeii,
and Costa, Italy; fragments of the buckets and a lead pipe, from a crank handle operated, chain driven,
bilge pump, were found one of the 1st century A.D.
Nemi ships, of
Lake Nemi;
[Needham, Volume 4, Part 2, p. 109.] and a preserved 2nd century A.D. example, used to raise water from a well, to an aquifer in London, has also been unearthed.
Talmudic sources
The term used by
sources for a saqiya is
'antelayyā-wheel.
Medieval Islamic realm
A manuscript by
Ismail al-Jazari featured an intricate device based on a saqiya, powered in part by the pull of an ox walking on the roof of an upper-level reservoir, but also by
Hydropower onto the spoon-shaped pallets of a
water wheel placed in a lower-level
reservoir.
[Needham, Volume 4, Part 2, p. 353.]
Complex saqiyas consisting of more than 200 separate components were used extensively by Muslim inventors and engineers in the medieval Islamic world.[Donald Hill (1996), "Engineering", in Roshdi Rashed, Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, Vol. 3, pp. 751–795 771.] The mechanical flywheel, used to smooth out the delivery of power from a driving device to a driven machine and, essentially, to allow lifting water from far greater depths (up to 200 metres), was employed by ibn Bassal (Floruit 1038–1075), of al-Andalus.
The first known use of a crank in a saqiya was featured in another one of al-Jazari's machines.[Donald Hill, "Engineering", p. 776, in Roshdi Rashed, ed., Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, Vol. 2, pp. 751–795, Routledge, London and New York][ Al-Jazari also constructed a water-raising device that was run by hydropower, though the Chinese had been using hydropower for the same purpose before him. Animal-powered saqiyas and water-powered similar to the ones he described have been supplying water in Damascus since the 13th century,][
]
See also
Notes
Further reading
-
Fraenkel, P., (1990) "Water-Pumping Devices: A Handbook for users and choosers" Intermediate Technology Publications.
-
Molenaar, A., (1956) "Water lifting devices for irrigation" FAO Agricultural Development Paper No. 60, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome.
