Lupine Publishers- Environmental and Soil Science Journal
Abstract
More than 150,000 Gallerias, Qanat Karez sweet water systems,
including more than 200,000 kilo meters of tunnels still exist in the
Middle
East, Central Asia and Mediterranean basins. Since the Islamic
agricultural revolution which took control of these water sources, they
are operated
inefficiently losing uncontrolled quantities of water. The original
ancient design was to direct water to arid zone of sabkha basins in
order to leach
salt deposits by leaching, (you have used leaching twice)
recrystallizing and precipitating the salts as pure thick strata S of
salt crust. The tunnels
are used today only for domestic and local agricultural water supply.
The engineering and construction of these systems involved extremely
heavy
investment, in difficult desert conditions. The human cost of building
the tunnels and boreholes could only have been justified by the value of
the
salt production resulting from the irrigation and flooding mechanisms.
This forgotten technology is no longer in use and the misunderstanding
has
caused misuse and inefficiency Many communities still rely on the
ancient Qanat.
Introduction
Modern no-tilling arable field cultivation has many advantages.
IT IS efficient, saves water, and energy, and results in a better use
of nutrient fertilizers. Ploughing and furrowing topsoil today, is
considered to be soil destructive. Opening the soil to bacteria and
fungus requires insect acids and fertilizers which is also problematic.
Most of the available water, for agriculture fields estimated to be at
90% of spate irrigation, is lost to evaporation. So how and why was
it ever Invented?. The answer perhaps, is that this familiar global
tilling, ploughing, technology used today by farmers, invented by
Islam, was actually developed in ancient Persia for a completely
different purpose: the leaching of pure salt crust from saline Sabkha
wetland alluvial soil, produced the basic commodity, common salt.
The salt leaching fields of the ancient Qanats, were inadvertently
adopted in the 9th century AD to serve a growing population which
Islam’s Jafari people reorganized. The thriving Silk Road salt supply
route began experiencing competition from the renaissance of the cheaper natural coastal Sabkha lagoons. Meers and fens which
were slowly exposed by lower eustatic sea levels and the Qanat
Karez salt leaching lost their importance. The Islamic agricultural
revolution has been considered by historians to be one of the
critical periods of technological advance particularly in irrigation
and crop planting, including farming of new vegetable types. The
agronomic literature of the time, with major books by Ibn Bassal
and Abu l-Khayr al-Ishbili, demonstrate the extensive diffusion of
useful plants to Medieval Spain (al Andalus). The growth in Islamic
scientific knowledge of agriculture and horticulture. New Islamic
crop farming needed less sophisticated equipment and water lifting
devices, less investment, and less experience and knowledge. It
simply needed much more water and flat arable land. Both these
last two items were close at hand since the surrounding desert
community field irrigation systems previously used for “farming”
leached salt were now standing idle. Due to a renaissance of the solar salt industries along the China grand canal wetlands and
Mediterranean and North Sea coasts, the once critical supplies of
the Silk Road could no longer compete with the old Sabkha coastal
lagoons and inundated wetlands which had come back into use
with lower eustatic sea levels.
Unfortunately, the leaching, tilling, ploughing, technology
previously used very effectively to produce slabs of salt, was
inherited by the new Islamic crop agriculture revolution. The tens
of thousands of ancient Persian Qanat Karez lines of tunnels and
boreholes were originally designed to surge irrigate the saline
fields by shallow flooding, dissolving the salt by capillary action,
followed by recrystallizing and precipitation as a pure crust
of assorted salts. Irrigation with sweet water from the Qanats
concentrated the salts by a capillary action to the topsoil. enabling
the formation of a solid crust. This was levered up and shaped into
blocks and slabs of salt ready for the camel caravans to transport
it to China in the east, and what was to become the new Ottoman
Empire in the West. The Islamic movement controlled these salt
supplies, mainly sodium chloride, well into the Middle Ages. One
of the salts precipitated in this way WAS potassium chloride the
main component of saltpeter. (American spelling saltpeter) The salt
crust also included thin layers of organic sediments or microbial
remains. This desert Qanat salt leaching was gradually discarded
in favor of new industrial processes. The salt fields were converted
to crop tilling and ploughing in spite of the high salinity, AS long as
the Qanat water was available. Both the salt leaching agriculture
and the original hydroponic “hanging garden” horticulture and
crop growing technologies mostly invented by the Persians in the
previous millennium, had been totally forgotten. The almost perfect
micro eco-system of such a typical oasis had consisted of mountain
shed water, Qanat fish, (specifically Alburnoides bi punctatus,
grown and caught in the Qanat of uzineh (Bloch 1782) and recycled
water with fish wastes to fertilize a very sophisticated hydroponic
horticulture and cascade aquaculture. By the time Marco Polo came
looking for this technology, it had been almost totally discarded,
together with the anecdotal Arabian One-thousand-and-one nights.
A closer examination of the present universally accepted tilling
and ploughing has raised many questions regarding its inefficiency,
soil destruction, and wasteful water consumption. The question
of fresh water supply has become possibly the most critical. The
“ancient” hanging garden technology of hydroponic horticulture,
has only recently gained ground as a new “start-up” operation,
still requiring high investment, but prominent among many
advantages, IT saves an estimated critical 90% of irrigation water
consumption. Many ancient pyramids and inverted step temple
systems seem to have been built over water sources and could well
have been sophisticated terrace and cascading aquaculture, only
possible in arid zones. In the Middle East today, water availability
has become a “Cassus belli” almost eliminating the calculated cost
of new desalination methods. Many centuries ago under almost identical circumstances, common salt: sodium chloride, was in
similar critical supply. the translation OF war, ; in Hebrew,
(“ado about” I don’t understand this), and Salt could
well serve to remind us of the extreme behavior of even highly
developed civilizations in crises of famine through forced lack of the
most basic supplies. Almost every community or town in Central
Asia, (particularly those in Iran) is built upon the foundations of
a Qanat [Kariz] [Falaj] tunnel water supply. Without this purposebuilt
ancient perquisite, a sophisticated, engineered water system,
none of these communities could have come into being. The
typical terrestrial locations of such communities are highly saline
Endorheic basins, in markedly arid zones. To motivate such high
human endeavor, an equivalent human need was necessary. With
regard to this “ raison deter” or the rationale to exist in such desolate
locations and to build such an infrastructure, one can only wonder
at the resulting richness of the cultures that have since become
icons of history. No less an historical explanation must be offered to
understand the wherewithal, from which it was subsidized.
These almost perfect oasis ecosystems seem to have existed
in almost perfect isolation. With the exception of the salt that
we know in hindsight supplied a temporary global famine, these
oases were an exclusive cultural heritage. From the Mediterranean
civilizations to the Dynasties of the Chinese coast, salt supplies
came from the Taklamakan and Persian deserts, in spite of treaty
ports and a seemingly more efficient seagoing route. The Silk
Road which historically has claimed to connect East with West,
was so named only recently by a German archaeologist since it
was recognized that the silk from China was a crucial element of
that trade. Yet we now know that the Silk was mostly a means of
exchange along the trading road, and a stable currency (particularly
amongst the Chinese) and only a minimal luxury item, rather than a
commodity. The Tuntian [屯 田 制] of the Han dynasty’s military
agro-communities were initially, exclusively directed to protect
and maintain the Eastern Silk Road route which supplied China.
The Great Wall was developed to protect the Qanat industry and
has often been compared to the Qanat engineering as a comparable
human achievement. In parallel, as global eustatic sea levels rose
to a peak the Sabkha pans were inundated and this caused a salt
famine. The protection of the western trade route and the Qanat
source systems, became the responsibility of the Jafari Islam. The
competition with Byzantium and the Crusaders consequently
resulted creation of the Ottoman Empire. The competition to the
Tuntian military agro-community was the Mongolians, and those
north of the Great Wall.
Conclusion
The traded, ultimate spice commodity produced mainly along
the Silk Road during an extended period of famine, and monopolized
by two main parties, each to its own direction, was slabs of “common
salt” in China, and the Mediterranean basin civilization. The means of
exchange were primarily silk from China and gold coins, Ducats
from Rome and Venice. Today’s new start up aqua-cultures including
hydroponics, are in fact very ancient technologies, directly linked
to the original Qanat Karez design and highly efficient in their use of
water which today, could prevent much of our present political
conflict. The oasis micro eco-systems based upon the Qanats are
a model ideally suited to modern sprawling populations, each
seeking local individuality and independent identities.
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