Hydraulic engineering: Norias of Hama, Syria (+VIDEO)

As it flows through the ancient city in western Syria, the gentle yet powerful current of the Orontes River relentlessly propels one of the world’s water engineering marvels: the Norias of Hama. Of the 17 surviving waterwheels, out of an estimated 30 that once existed in the Syrian city, the one known as the Noria al-Muhammadiya, dating from 1361 AD, is the oldest and the largest, measuring nearly 22 m in diameter. It is precisely this one that the American Society of Mechanical Engineers declared in 2006, for the technological breakthrough on an international scale that its construction represented, as a Historic Monument of Mechanical Engineering.

For centuries, the Norias of Hamas were used to lift water from the river, by means of wooden boxes or buckets, and deposit it in the initial section of an aqueduct. The water flowed through the aqueduct thanks to the force of gravity and finally reached its destination, the irrigation systems of the orchards, the hydraulic systems of the town and its fountains, and the local mosque. Today, however, they are preserved only as historical monuments, representing the technology used by medieval Muslim societies. However, according to some documentary and archaeological records, the history of these devices goes back much further.

Indeed, according to Dr. Marek T. Olszewski of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw, the oldest known representation of a hydraulic device such as the Norias of Hama is found in a mosaic that unknown looters plundered in illegal excavations in the city of Apamea in 2011, (a mosaic whose whereabouts are unknown, by the way, and which is the subject of an Interpol investigation). Archaeologists claim that the mosaic depicts a wooden wheel on a pyramidal structure supplying water to a Roman bathhouse with a swimming pool and a slide.

Given the similarity with the waterwheels preserved in the city of Hama, and the fact that Apamea is only 50 km northwest of it and on the same course of the Orontes River, it is very likely that the waterwheels have a much older origin. In any case, according to Professor Olszewski, the Roman mosaic, and with it its depiction of the waterwheel, would date from the first half of the 4th century AD, perhaps from the time of Emperor Constantine the Great (306-337 AD). However, another mosaic was found in Apamea dating to AD 469 and depicting a similar waterwheel. According to documents written around 1225 in Yakut (Turkic language of the Siberian branch), several waterwheels existed in Hama as early as 884 AD.

To conclude our ode to the Norias of Hama, we leave you with the description given to them by the brothers Jérôme and Jean Tharaud in their book Le chemin de Damas (Paris, 1913): “The long melodies produced by the Norias spread over the ether … a forgotten dream on the riverbank and part of a poem melodically expressed with a simple musical instrument of love and carefreeness”.