Shushtar Historical Hydraulic System
Interesting facts
- Accounts of the Roman captives who built Band-e Kaisar suggest the workforce may have numbered as many as 70,000 men, including army engineers.
- Band-e Kaisar remained in service for roughly sixteen centuries, repaired again and again, until it finally collapsed in 1885.
- Band-e Kaisar is regarded as the first structure in Iran to combine a bridge and a dam in a single work.
- The story of the Roman prisoners at Shushtar was recorded by the Persian historians Tabari in the 9th century and Masudi in the 10th.
- Its builders used sandstone blocks around a core of Roman concrete, binding the stones with mortar and iron clamps.
- To stop the current scouring the foundations, the riverbed under Band-e Kaisar was paved with large stone slabs, giving it the local name Shadorvan.
- The weir raised the Karun by an estimated three to four metres, enough to feed canals irrigating around 150,000 hectares of farmland.
- Band-e Kaisar had more than forty arches, and later repairs in the Islamic era replaced some of the original round arches with pointed ones.
- The Gargar channel, dug as part of the same scheme, runs for about 50 kilometres across the plain.
- When it was inscribed in 2009, the Shushtar system became Iran's tenth World Heritage Site, covering about 240 hectares.
Why it is worth it
At Shushtar the Karun River is split, dammed, tunnelled and dropped over cliffs in a system of waterworks that has kept the town and its fields alive for well over fifteen centuries. Water spills from tunnels behind the Gargar dam, turns old mill races and tumbles down in cascades beside the town — an image that sums up one of the most ambitious feats of hydraulic engineering to survive from the ancient world.
The system grew over a long period. Its beginnings are attributed to the Achaemenid era and the reign of Darius the Great, but most of it took shape under the Sasanian kings, who turned Shushtar into a carefully managed oasis on the edge of the Khuzestan plain. Two great diversion canals, the Gargar and the Dariun, take water off the Karun and carry it around the town, creating an artificial island known as Mianab, with Shushtar at its northern tip. Weirs and bridge-dams hold the river at the right level, tunnels feed irrigation channels, and three main tunnels lead water from behind the Gargar bridge-dam to a cluster of watermills and artificial falls. UNESCO inscribed the ensemble on the World Heritage List in 2009 as thirteen separate sites, among them the Mizan diversion dam, the Kolah-Farangi tower and the Salasel Castle, from which the whole system was once controlled.
The most famous single structure is the Band-e Kaisar, or "Caesar's dam", a weir and bridge some 500 metres long across the Karun. Tradition holds that it was built in the third century AD by Roman soldiers captured when the Sasanian king Shapur I defeated the emperor Valerian, and it is often described as the easternmost Roman bridge and dam. Shushtar itself is an old city — known as Adamdun in Elamite times — whose name is popularly explained as "more beautiful than Shush", after nearby Susa, and which lost much of its trade when the Trans-Iranian Railway was routed through Ahvaz instead.
Getting there
The hydraulic system lies in and around the town of Shushtar in Khuzestan Province, south-western Iran, on the Karun River about 92 km by road from the provincial capital, Ahvaz. The nearest airport is Dezful Airport (DEF), about 60 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Shushtar Historical Hydraulic System is a complex irrigation system of the island city Shushtar from the Sasanian era. It consists of 13 dams, bridges, canals and structures which work together as a hydraulic system.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
32.05372, 48.84869per Wikidata