ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the ancient underground aqueducts in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Iran. Some regional cases in other countries will be occasionally mentioned when dealing with the questions of the chronology and diffusion of the earliest witnesses. All the documents and case studies presented here can be grouped under the generic term shafts-and-gallery aqueducts (as suggested by E. Chiotis in his introduction Chapter 1 in this volume, tapping groundwater). The last words of that definition aim at excluding the (partly or totally) subterranean aqueducts collecting water from springs, lakes, and dams. Conversely, the depth of the mother well cannot be used for making a distinction between the so-called Iranian qanāt and the other types of qanāt or falaj, as has been often assumed in hundreds of papers. As a matter of fact, the vocabulary used by the local people and hence by scholars in several countries, and the word qanāt, from Iran to Egypt via Syria, 280is limited, and one cannot reduce this term to the aqueduct with a deep mother well tapping a deep aquifer. * Therefore, qanāt for Iran and falaj for the UAE and the Sultanate of Oman are employed here in the broad meaning as defined above. Both of them encompass a large “family” of water catchments.
