Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1984 - 63

The

Archaeology

CALIFORNIA
JosephL. Chartkoff& KerryKonaChartkoff. Extensively illustrated, unsurpassed in comprehensiveness, and
written in non-technical language for
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Stanford

The water-driven noria was a vital component of Islamic development of rice
aquaculture. The form illustrated here in
a thirteenth-century manuscript retelling an episode from the tale ofBayãd
and Riyãd presumably had earthenwarepots strapped to its outer rim when
in operation. The total lift of some
ancient norias approached 30 meters.
artifacts) and in the contemporaneous
growth of the city of Co Loa (just west
of modern Hanoi) that economicstability
ensured an unprecedented growth of
wealth in this area. Logic would demand
that similar developments occurred in
the areas around the other main waterways of Southeast Asia.
Islamic influences
The later westward dispersal of Asian
cultivars - mainly indicas - probably
began in about 1000B.c. Chinese sources
document rice cultivation in several
parts of Mesopotamia and Persia in the
second century B.c. that presumably
derived from Alexander's earlier incur-

sions into northern India. At the same
time, according to the later Greek historian Strabo, rice was also known in
Babylonia and Susiana. It is not mentioned in the Bible, but several references in the Jerusalem Talmud indicate
that rice was grown in Palestine in the
third century a.D., if not well before that
date. Yet overall, rice seems to have had
little impact on local agriculture.
All that changed with the spread of
Islam. Its importance never equalled that
of wheat, but rice became a food staple
in desert oases, in river valleys susceptible to flooding, and in swamplands such
as the Fayyum of Egypt. To achieve
this, the Arabs instituted an aggressive
policy of land irrigation. Where such
systems already existed, but were in
ruin, they demanded renovation. Canals
and aqueducts were cleared of centuriesold silt and broached dams were rebuilt.
The devices for lifting water out of wells
and rivers, such as the shadüf and the
noria, were given a new lease on life. (The
pressure this put on the availability of a
continued on page 76

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Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1984

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1984