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Qanat

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423 pointsvinnyglennon100 comments

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Related ancient Persian technology: the yakhchal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l) (a.k.a the ice pit).

We still use the same word in farsi for refrigerators today.

We still use half of the same word in English! 'yakh' and 'ice' are cognates.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%DB%8C%D8%AE

We use the other half too. 'Chal' and 'hole' are cognates as well.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%DA%86%D8%A7%D9%84#Persian

YakhChAL: Ice-hollow.

There are many cognates between Farsi and English. Here’s my list of really obvious ones:

Mani/Meaning

Dobare/Again (Double)

Vacal/Vocal

Lab/Lip

No/New

Baradar/Brother

Beitar/Better

Dokhtar/Daughter

Mord/Dead (i.e mortal)

Pose/Pose

Setareh/Star

Recid/Received

Dar/Door

Darije/Degree

Band (Bebande, mibandam)/To bind

Both languages being in the Indo-European language family, that's not very surprising.

Sure. And we all live on the same planet, and everything is related to everything else, so nothing is surprising.

Weird take.

They might be but that link doesn't seem to say that.

I love learning cognates that don't really look it. Acadian and Cajun is another favorite, although I'm not sure if it counts if they're both used in English.

Try saying "Acadian" quickly, and you can see pretty easily how it might elide into "Cajun".

Uh-cay-dee-yan

Cay-dee-yan

Cage-dee-yan

Cay-jee-yan

Cay-jun

Speech gets lazier with repetition. Ask any native of New Orleans how their city's name is pronounced: the majority will say something like "Noo-ahh-lins" or even just "Nah'lins".

New Orleans. Outside it's four syllable. Inside it's one

That's a stretch.

It's true though. The same transformation of the ending syllables happened with Indian becoming Injun (although that one eventually became offensive, unlike Cajun).

I think I read the word with the stress on the second syllable. On the first one it makes a lot more sense now.

I also stumbled upon this from here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classifi...

It is used to describe climates in the above article.

Relatedly, the word "icebox" also used to be commonly used to refer to refrigerators in the early 20th century, because before the advent of domestic refrigerating machines, ice in a (insulated) box was used.

I visited several of these things in Yazd. Super fascinating technology (and the city in general too).

Just a minor off topic pet peeve of mine, but why not keep calling the language that Persians speak "Persian" in English? Just how it doesn't feel entirely right to suddenly start calling Spanish "Español" instead in English, or Swedish as "Svenska" and so on. I've met so many people not realizing the endonym "farsi" is just a (for some reason) new word in English used for the already well established name for the Persian language

That's a very interesting question. I've only ever heard it referred to as Farsi, so I didn't even know there was another option. Intriguingly, Wikipedia provides plenty of information, which seems to support your position (italics mine):

"Farsi, which is the Persian word for the Persian language, has also been used widely in English in recent decades, more often to refer to Iran's standard Persian. However, the name Persian is still more widely used. The Academy of Persian Language and Literature has maintained that the endonym Farsi is to be avoided in foreign languages, and that Persian is the appropriate designation of the language in English, as it has the longer tradition in western languages and better expresses the role of the language as a mark of cultural and national continuity. Iranian historian and linguist Ehsan Yarshater, founder of the Encyclopædia Iranica and Columbia University's Center for Iranian Studies, mentions the same concern in an academic journal on Iranology, rejecting the use of Farsi in foreign languages."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_language#Name

It’s part of our overseas propaganda efforts to use American linguistic hegemony to void cultural and historical ties with countries we aren’t friends with. The language is Persian, not Farsi.

I guess only the Italians and the Russians have American friendship.

French in French = Francais

German in German = Deutsch

Spanish in Spanish = Espanola

Dutch in Dutch = Nederlands (old name: Diets, I might add)

Irish in Irish = Gaelic (actually kind-of refers to 2 languages, but ...)

Swedish in Swedish = Svenska

Norwegian in Norwegian = Norsk

Finnish in Finnish = Suomalainen

(Note: most of these have various accents and special characters that aren't correctly typed here, as well as a bunch of nuances that really should be there)

Irish in Irish is Gaeilge, not Gaelic.

Gaelic is an English word for a family of languages which Gaeilge belongs to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic

Farsi is solely the name of the language. Persian could describe the language or a number of other things, such as the culture, the people, etc.

Farsi and Persian are interchangable in the context of the language, and plenty of Persian Americans prefer using "Persian" to name the language rather than Farsi (this is especially common among persians who refer to themselves as "Persian," and I think a lot of it is because "Farsi" is associated with "Iranian" which has a less ideal connotation associated with it in the West today). But it's not universal, and both are pretty widely accepted.

That's my understanding. I'm not versed in the historical details though. There's probably a Persian culture professor lurking who can offer a more informed answer.

I have only ever heard of the language referred to as Farsi in English. We call the language that Mexicans speak, Spanish, not Mexican.

Yes, because they speak Spanish. But you call it Spanish, not "Español". That's the point.

There are perfectly fine English words for what the Spanish call "Español" ("Spanish"), and what the Germans call "Deutsch" ("German"), and what the Indonesians call "Bahasa Indonesia" ("Indonesian"), and what the French call "Français" ("French"), and what the Chinese call "普通话" ("Mandarin"), and what the Persians call "Farsi" ("Persian").

Funnily enough it's called Spanish because it's from Spain.

> We call the language that Mexicans speak, Spanish, not Mexican

In the same way that we use “French” for the language spoken by the Quebecois as well as that spoken by the French, we use “Spanish” for the one spoken by Mexicans as well as that spoken by the Spanish, sure. (Same as we use “English” for the language spoken by Americans as well as the one spoken by people in England.)

But that's not what’s going on with Farsi.

I've only ever known the language as being called "Farsi". I don't think I've ever heard the language being called "Persian".

Not all countries where Spanish is spoken call it Español. In many countries, notably including Spain itself, it is called Castellano (Castillian). There are several other (mostly related) languages also spoken in Spain, such as Galician or Catalan.

"Spanish language" can be a bit imprecise because it could mean different things in different contexts.

Here's a link you can use to explain the topic to people who make this mistake: https://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Languages/persian_not_farsi.h...

I would be quite happy if we had a word for the language of France that was distinct from the adjective. It's not uncommon that I need to pause and clarify (typically "French people", that is, native francophones vs. residents of France). Not sure why more ambiguity is to be sought after.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I would never interpret "French people" to mean anything other than people from France (not necessarily resident in France though). If we're referring to language then it would be something like "French speakers", or "native French speakers" if you want to be specific.

He meant "French" primarily means "French people" and only secondarily "French language".

I'd try to distinguish this with a definite article, like "the French" vs "French", but what do I know?

The irony.

I am a bit indignant at having to call English British English, why isn’t it English English; to differentiate it from American English, decorated with a little US flag as a visual guide.

To include English as spoken in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, etc. “Celtic archipelago English” is a mouthful, although it would be more accurate when including Ireland.

Seriously. OP doesn't seem to realize that someone in Ireland may also be a "bit indignant" at suggesting it's merely "English" English.

British English means it's English as written in the British Isles.

Someone in Ireland may reasonably also have a problem with “British Isles”, but that’s harder to fix.

Am I the only one that didn't understand how this is suppose to work from reading the first paragrah on the wiki article? My first question right away was: how do they get the water from an "underground aquaduct" to "the surface"? To me it seems the water would have to travel up. But by doing some more research, I understand the water well is higher up in a mountain, and the "underground aquaduct" is traveling down the mountain, and reaches the "surface" when it comes out of the side of the mountain. But the way it is described in the first paragraph of the article didn't make that clear to me. It amazes me that apparently other people don't have this question when reading about an "underground aquaduct" that brings water to the "surface". I would rather describe it as an underground aquaduct inside a mountain, guiding the mountain water to an edge of the mountain where it exits.

I didn't realise the water table at higher elevations could be above the ground level of nearby lower elevation land, so I had the same issue. When I first read the article I thought a qanat was a type of stepwell[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepwell

The water table typically rises and falls with elevation. Depends on the kind of rock/soil in the area.

I knew that was true across long distances. I didn't realise the water table could be high above sea level at point A, lower at point B, and yet points A and B could still be close enough to each other to manually dig a tunnel between them.

Had the exact same question and though the same thing as you ("I can't believe the author didn't think this was an important thing to make clear in the first paragraph")

Didn't need much research because the picture later in the article made it clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat#/media/File:Qanat_cross_...

Actually this has been my usual experience with wikipedia, the first paragraphs never make the subject clear to me, I always end up with a lot of questions.

The tunnel of Eupalinos is also an interesting reference. From before 550bc on the island of Samos, it was an irrigation tunnel through a mountain. They started digging on both sides and managed to meet in the middle just 60cm off. Pythagoras was just a boy at that time, but I like to think he was influenced.

Qanat will be history soon. Iran, like West USA, has exploited available water resources and there is simply no water left.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_scarcity_in_Iran

The qanat system was effectively destroyed by the Mongols when they invaded Iran centuries ago. That contributed to the desertification of Iran and its overall decline.

Hmm. How did the mongols do that? Qanat’s are not magical water making devices, they are just a long tunnel which leads the water already in the ground to the surface. Even if the Mongols were actively demolishing the tunnels the water is still there underground.

Maybe there is some second order effect I am not aware of, but this statement sounds fishy to me.

Iran was basically a throphy throne for Turkic strongmen to roleplay Persian King of kings for most of its post-Islam history. I assume the collapse of a strong nation state post mongols destroyed any hope of a top level national reconstruction effort. Water was sourced from north and flowed down south. It's like saying there we still have coal when someone has come and ripped up the entire railway network. More aptly, think Christmas lights in series. Now imagine the lights are little oasis towns, and far flung. Water stops flowing one day and it never comes back. That's likely what happened. (Also remember that Iran is ~1/3 the size of US and the dry parts are in the interior.)

Mongols did this throughout the Islamicate world and did it to South Asia also. They destroyed tons of existing infrastructure and by the time civilizations here started recovering, they had to deal with an ascendant Western Europe.

These tunnels have to be cleaned and maintained. If you kill all the people around, the tunnels will not be usable for much longer.

Wonderful video which is somewhat related: https://youtu.be/twAP3buj9Og?si=muhCC08RsFzofObB

This entire thread is fantastic and a great learning opportunity. Sent me spiraling through Wikipedia pages. This video is really great too!

Agreed. Reading/watching this stuff reminded me of my experience visiting Morocco a few years ago. We travelled through the Atlas mountains and into the desert regions bordering the Sahara and then into the Sahara itself. I was struck by how everywhere we went, you could see signs of how people had tried to extract water from what appeared to be an utterly arid environment, whereas back home in Ontario, everywhere you look there is infrastructure designed to manage large amounts of it. Our biggest water-related problem is that we often have too much of it, a problem that seemed scarcely imaginable over there.

It seems the video is making rounds yet again—it was also recommended to me by the algorithm a few days ago.

This was an incredible video. Thanks for sharing!

amazing vid!

The Wikipedia article mentions this part twice but it doesn’t seem to explain why:

> The system has the advantage of being resistant to natural disasters, such as earthquakes and floods, and to deliberate destruction in war.

Like, it’s a tunnel underground; it sure seems like an earthquake might misalign or fill it so that it becomes unusable. Or in wartime I’d dump sewage down one of the shafts to ruin the water supply…what are the protections against this?

Obviously, compared to other means of transporting water at that time! For example an “open” river could have been more vulnerable in certain circumstances.

Strong earthquakes may affect the path of the rivers as well.

But I see your point in that, resistance to earthquakes or adversities are not what Qanat/Kariz were famous for (as far as we know).

Aqueducts would be far more vulnerable.

Water pipes with 0 leeway for movement or elongation/shortening in the violently shaking ground or in the walls cracking seems less resilient, at least in some cases, than these 'mud' tunnels.

A lot of it might be hearsay or exaggerations.

Video from Asianometry about Iran's water problems, mentioning quanat: https://youtu.be/watch?v=aaEhNTpvEN8

Qanat is an Arabic word which translates to "Canal", but it's a little more traditional and made to transfer water for long distances between a source of water and an agriculture field for irrigation.

A little side note, the original name of Qanat in Persian is “Kariz”.

Curious, seems to me that they all come from the same Akkadian (ancient Semitic language) root:

"From earlier form کاهریز‎ (/ kāhrēz /) or کهریز‎ (/ kahrēz /), from Middle Persian [Book Pahlavi needed] (ksryc / kahrēz /) (compare Manichaean Middle Persian 𐫞𐫍𐫡𐫏𐫉‎ (qhryz / kahrēz /, “qanat”), Parthian 𐫞𐫍𐫡𐫏𐫝‎ (qhryc / kahrēz /, “qanat”) and Khunsari کیریز‎ (/ kēirīz) /), or compound of کاه‎ (kâh, “straw”) +‎ ریز‎ (rêz, “to throw”). They used to throw straws in qanats' wells to see how rapid the movement of water is for repair purposes."

Vs Latin "canal":

"For cannālis, from canna (“reed, cane”), from Ancient Greek κάννα (kánna, “reed”).*

And the Greek in turn comes, apparently, from Akkadian (Semitic) "qanûm" "reed".

And so I'd guess the Arabic 'qanat' either from either Akkadian or from its own Semitic vocabulary or was borrowed back in from Greek.

Nifty.

What a coincidence, recently saw it on Asianometry's video about the Iran water crisis.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaEhNTpvEN8

also mentioned in "Dune", the novel, along with other arabic/persian words.

I somehow managed to read most of Children of Dune without looking up what a qanat is. Since then I've remembered it specifically for use in Scrabble, but over 20 years later I've still yet to get the opportunity to use it (I don't play Scrabble much any more).

Tenerife also has 'galerias' that are dug horizontally into the mountain to obtain water. (They were dug much later thsn the qanats to my understanding)

https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galer%C3%ADa_filtrante

In 1993, I visted Turpan in Xinjiang and saw the exit of one of the many qanats there. Turpan is in a depression that is more than 100 meters below sealevel. The depression is rather flat, so you barely notice that you are that low. It is also a rather dry place with about 15mm of rainfall per year and very cold winters and very hot in the summer. Not so strange, as it is very far from any ocean. Turpan is famous for its grapes. During the summer they let grapes grow over streets and path ways to benefit from the shadow.

Some more discussion previously 7 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11719441

How sloped are water tables, typically?

Rough answer: as sloped as the terrain on top.

Better answer: it depends.

Best answer: find your local equivalent of https://www3.twdb.texas.gov/apps/WaterDataInteractive/Ground...

Good image showing the rows of excavation holes and tailings:

https://www.ancientpages.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/qana...

A nearby shopping center used to be called Qanat until it got bought out and renamed to the very generic (Corporation) Square a few years ago. Everyone still just calls it Qanat because it's such a cool word, with an interesting history!

I guess it is called "NAME OF THE CORPORATION square", but, well, isn't "corporation square" a great name for a mall!

I’m guessing that the use of pump driven wells chasing the falling water table in the US means building these today isn’t viable, which is a shame.

Were the Persians smart enough to consider ground water recharge to feed the aquifers?

I first encountered this concept in a Sierra Adventure game:

https://youtu.be/rd-epKNOo0U?t=3049

Also see Seville attempt to cool public spaces using modern variant:

https://cartujaqanat.com/

“Cecil - No civilization in history has ever considered ‘chief hydrological engineer’ a calling.”

Very useful word if you play Words with friends

> By 400 BCE, Persian engineers had mastered the technique of storing ice in the middle of summer in the desert.

The ingenuity of ancient people cannot be overstated. Some of us think that before around 1800, everyone still lived in primitive conditions... I guess this is an awesome counterpoint.

It's weird to me how compressed recent history actually is. Unix was 1970, LISP was 1960, the US Civil Rights Act was 1964. The Ottoman Empire was dissolved in the 1920s. At the same time, there's already so much on the Internet. The iPhone was released in 2007.

Now I'm wondering if the sum total of all inventions prior to 1800 is more or less than the total since 2000, to pick a random year with no particular reason for the choice.

And how would you weight the importance of the inventions?

I think ice is nice — but autoclaves, antibiotics, and anaesthesia during surgery are much more important.

They had antibiotics. Democedes used apples fermented in hay to produce something which contained penicillin when he performed the first known masectomy of Darius' wife Atossa

I can't find the source right now but it's similar to Peruvian Tocosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocosh

These kinds of comparisons are category errors: you don't get to autoclaves and antibiotics without the civilization-level changes that get you irrigation and ice in summer.

I don't deny that, my claim is more of "what counts as 'primitive conditions'?"

"Ice is nice" is severely understating the importance of refrigeration. The ability to preserve fresh foods is easily up there with penicilin.

There are a lot of ways to preserve food without refrigeration.

There are a lot of ways to stay healthy without penicillin.

Doesn't mean penicillin isn't super-helpful. Doesn't mean refrigeration isn't super-helpful.

Your question is essentially unknowable, as the definition of invention is unclear, and we have no hope of estimating quantity with anything like the precision we have with modern recordkeeping (we can't estimate how many patents would have been produced in the 10th century had the modern patent system existed back then). Recall that there's a lot of innovation in the "little things"; note that a parallel post is talking about different shapes of spearheads, and each of those variations would definitely correspond to a new patent in the modern patent system. At the same time, most written sources throughout history are from elites, who give very little thought to what the working classes are doing, and thus tend to ignore innovation that does exist.

My gut instinct is that innovation rate throughout history is largely constant on a per-capita basis, although I would admit that probably some industries are more or less innovative at various stages or in history. Through that lens, the fact that you're looking at >10× total person-years pre-1800 compared to post-2000 means that I'd feel rather comfortable opining that there were more total innovations before 1800 than after 2000.

> Now I'm wondering if the sum total of all inventions prior to 1800 is more or less than the total since 2000

Not sure why you have the gap between 1800 and 2000. But the number of things 'invented' before 1800 is massive in terms of the broad categories of things we consider essential to life e.g. (in no particular order) fire, transport, cooking, metal working, agriculture, animal husbandry, buildings, weapons, health care, books, paintings, music, optics, etc. There are very few things after 2000 of such importance.

I suspect that if you had a single cut-off at 1800, 'before' might still win, if we stick to these high-level categories, rather than, say, patent applications.

“autoclaves, antibiotics, and anesthesia during surgery are nice but the super intelligent AI that found the cure for all illnesses and the ability to go back in time and etc. are more important.”

Someone in x thousand years from now.

Or even a hundred. The "singularity" analogy isn't one I favour[0] but the radical changes the idea represents would make today seem like a primitive ancient world to those that come after it.

[0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/09/20/not-a-singu...

Beer was made in ancient Mesopotamia and they didn’t kill themselves by methanol poisoning, so we can go back pretty far.

Looks like this has been posted multiple times in the past.. I wonder why. Is there a story here ?

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=qanat

Easy points

Crucial scrabble word

I came by to say this. You'd want to know about "qi" and "qat" too of course.

As someone entirely unfamiliar with the word until now, the first pronunciation inside my head, though immediately deemed wrong of course, was /CUE-ah-not/.

That's not surprising, since Qanon (what came to mind when I saw this word) is pronounced with the leading CUE as well.

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