Food Sources: Earth, Water, and Air - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 70

inundation. But the general practice in
the South was that of water-storage. For
instance, there were thousands of canals in
Baglana cut from the river, and they sup-
plied water to every village and town dur-
ing the 11th/17th century. Tīpū Sulān,
however, built a large canal in the tradi-
tion of the Muslim rulers of North India.
In 1797 he constructed a dam across the
Kavari, a few miles west of Sringapatam,
with an embankment 70 feet high. This
irrigation system survived till the close of
the 19th century, when the modern canal
system began. The Persian wheel also
became obsolete, owing to the introduc-
tion of tube-well technology, so that in the
Pan ¡ āb and western Uttar Pradesh they
have almost disappeared.

utaries coming down from the Kun-Lun
mountains, to the east of the Tien Shan,
must have had irrigation works long ante-
dating the coming of Islam, even where
specific information is lacking and their
existence can only be inferred from the
sparse archaeological investigations in
such regions.
Thus ground surveys and the results of
aerial photography have enabled scholars
like the late S.P. Tolstov to show how
irrigation in ‡ w ārazm depended on a
complex system of canals and channels
from the lower Syr Darya and extending
westwards towards the Caspian.
The irrigation systems of what was the
pre-Islamic Iranian region of Sogdia are
especially well known from the mediae-
val Arabic and Persian geographers and
local historians and were the subject of a
special monograph by W. Barthold. The
river which flowed through the heart of
Sogdia, the Nahr al-u ∞ d or Zaraf ª ān,
watered an extensive agricultural region
in which were located the great cities of
Bu ¶ ārā and Samarand and many signif-
icant smaller urban centres; under Islam,
the zenith of their prosperity was reached
under the local dynasty of the Sāmānids
(3rd-4th/9th-10th centuries). The left
bank tributaries of the Zaraf ª ān com-
ing down from the Buttamān mountains
(in what is now northern Tajikistan and
the eastern part of the Ka ª kadar'inskaya
oblast of Uzbekistan) were fed by large
quantities of melted snow in spring and
early summer. There were along them
diversionary dams which divided up the
river flows and led them into irrigation
channels, called from later mediaeval
Islamic times onwards by the term used
in Turkish ar/ar ∞ (but probably of non-
Turkish origin). A dam constructed four
farsa ¶ s from Samarand gave its name to
the locality Wara ∞ sar, lit. “head of the
dam”. The irrigation waters from there

(I.H. Siddiqui)

10. Irrigation in Transoxania
The rivers of Inner Asia, extending
from ‡ w ārazm in the west through
Transoxania to eastern Turkistān (the
later Sinkiang) and northwards to the
Semirečye, have all been extensively used
for irrigation purposes in the lands along
those rivers and in oasis centres, provid-
ing a possibility for agriculture in favoured
spots which were not too open to attack
from the steppe nomads or more north-
erly forest peoples. Hence, as elsewhere
in the Old World, the maintenance of
irrigation works, surface canals and kārīz s
or subterranean channels (these last to be
found as far east as the Tarim basin and
the fringes of China proper) depended on
injections of capital from strong local rul-
ers, on the mass mobilisation of labour for
construction and maintenance work, and
on vigorous defence policies to protect the
settled lands. Such river systems as those
of the Oxus, Zaraf ª ān and Syr Darya
to the west of the Tien Shan mountains,
and those of the Tarim river and its trib-