Noria

A noria is a large water wheel, turned by the current of the river or stream it stands in rather than by any external power, that lifts water using a ring of containers, whether pots, buckets or compartments, fixed around its rim; as the wheel turns, each container fills at the bottom of its circuit and empties automatically at the top into an aqueduct or channel that carries the water away to irrigate fields or supply a town. Simple paddle-driven water-lifting wheels were already in use in Egypt by the fourth century BC, and Roman engineers refined the design by around 300 AD, replacing wooden compartments built into the wheel itself with separate ceramic pots tied around the rim of an open wooden frame. Engineers of the Islamic Golden Age adopted and further improved the noria across the Mediterranean and Middle East, and some of its most famous surviving examples, including the great norias of Hama in Syria and the Albolafia noria at Cordoba in Spain, date from the Islamic period in those regions; the technology also reached East Asia, where versions of the noria remain in use today.