Norias of Hama
Interesting facts
- The Laxey Wheel that took al-Muhammadiya's record in 1854 is only about a metre larger, with a diameter of 22.1 metres.
- The date of al-Muhammadiya is carved on its aqueduct as the year 763 of the Islamic calendar, corresponding to 1361 CE.
- The wheels range from 7 to 21 metres across, and at least five of them are 17 metres or more.
- Each water box holds between 4 and 12 litres, and the smaller wheels lift around 50,000 litres an hour.
- To turn its heavy load, al-Muhammadiya is fed by an unusually long weir set at a sharp angle across the river, clearly visible from above.
- Some weirs on the Orontes serve as many as four norias at once, with wheels on both banks.
- Gardeners shared the water by turns, steering the flow with small makeshift dams of stones and rags in the channels.
- Danish archaeologists working in Hama in the 1930s counted 20 working norias; by 1970 only eight were still in use.
- A 13th-century historian recorded norias in Hama as early as the late 9th century.
- Hama's young men have long ridden the turning wheels and dived from the top into the Orontes.
Why it is worth it
Seventeen giant wooden wheels turn in the Orontes as it passes through Hama, lifting river water in small boxes set into their rims and tipping it into stone aqueducts high above the bank. The largest, the Noria al-Muhammadiya, measures 21 metres across, carries 120 water boxes and needs about a minute for a single revolution; at full flow it raised some 200,000 litres an hour. As they turn, the thick walnut axles give off a deep groan, the sound from which the noria takes its Arabic name, and curtains of spray drip from the rims.
The wheels exist because the Orontes is sluggish and runs between high banks at Hama, so lifting water was the practical way to irrigate the gardens beyond. Norias were probably already working here by the late 12th century, and possibly far earlier: a mosaic from Apamea, 55 km downstream, shows a near-identical wheel around 350 CE. Two dates are fixed by inscriptions: 1361 for al-Muhammadiya, built to feed the Great Mosque of Hama about a kilometre away along with a bathhouse, fountains and houses, and 1453 for the Noria al-Ma'muriyya. Al-Muhammadiya held the title of the world's tallest waterwheel for nearly five centuries, until the Laxey Wheel on the Isle of Man overtook it in 1854. In 2006 the American Society of Mechanical Engineers named it a Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark.
Each wheel is an undershot design, pushed from below by a channel cut through a low weir just upstream; sluices in the weir set the speed. Walnut takes the load at the axle and bearings, while poplar, pine and oak go into the rest, and because the timber wears out, a wheel's wooden parts were reckoned to be entirely renewed roughly every fifteen years. That work has passed down through families of noria carpenters. Water from the aqueducts was once divided among gardeners on a carefully shared schedule. Motor pumps and the Rastan dam upstream, completed in 1960, ended the wheels' working life, and many aqueducts were later cut short, but restorations, peaking with seven wheels in 1988, kept 17 norias turning as the emblem of the city.
Hama itself is one of Syria's oldest cities, the Hamath of the Hebrew Bible and capital of an Iron Age kingdom; in the Middle Ages it spread across both banks of the Orontes with mosques, madrasas and more than thirty waterwheels. Large parts of the historic town were destroyed in 1982, and the norias are now its best-known survivors.
Getting there
The norias line the Orontes in central Hama, which lies about 213 km north of Damascus and 46 km north of Homs. The nearest airport in a straight line is Latakia International (LTK), about 79 km to the west, on the far side of the coastal mountains; Damascus International Airport (DAM) lies to the south.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Norias of Hama are a series of 17 norias, historic water-raising machines for irrigation, along the Orontes River in the city of Hama, Syria. They are tall water wheels with box-like water collection compartments embedded around their rims. As the river flows, it pushes these water collection boxes under water, where they quickly fill up, then are driven up to the top of the wheel where they empty into an aqueduct. The aqueduct can carry the water to supply buildings, gardens and farmland.
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