Domain XXII · WATER & ENGINEERING
Water & Engineering
آب
Gravity does the work · Baoli, qanat, the tank
Rootsthe tradition
The baoli's descending flights and landings, the qanat's shafted underground channel, the stepped tank with ghat and cistern, sluice, chute and chadar, the Persian wheel's pot-chain.
The ideawhat it values
Water was not pumped so much as persuaded downhill, along a channel cut at a slope shallow enough to hold it and steep enough to move it. The stepped well inverts the problem: rather than raise water to people, it takes people down to the water, course of stone by course of stone. The engineering is in the section, not the façade.
Plateswhat the record looks like
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The groundin the Atlas
The tree names 116 topics here, under Architecture & Monuments and Sciences & Technology. A branch carries more than one domain, so read it as the ground rather than the boundary.
Writtenwhere the archive stands
Nothing written here yet. The tree already names 116 topics on this ground, so the gap is one of writing rather than of scope — and saying so is more use than filling the page.