Qanāt and Falaj: Polycentric and Multi-Period Innovations: Iran and the United Arab Emirates as Case- Studies
Résumé
This chapter deals with the ancient underground aqueducts in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Iran. Some regional cases in other countries will be occasionnally mentioned when dealing with the questions of the chronology and diffusion of the earliest witnesses. All the documents and case studies presented here can be grouped under the generic term "shafts-and-gallery aqueducts" (as suggested by E. Chiotis in his introduction Chapter 1 in this volume, "tapping groundwater"). The last words of that definition aim at excluding the (party or totally) subterranean aqueducts collecting water from springs, lakes, and dams. Conversely, the depth of the mother well cannot be used for making a distinction between the so-called Iranian "qanat" and the other types of "qanat or falaj", as has been often assumed in hundreds of papers. As a matter of fact, the vocabulary used by the local people and hence by scholars in several countries, and the word "qanat", from Iran to Egypt via Syria.
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