Shadoof

A shadoof, also spelled shaduf, is a hand-operated device for lifting water from a river, well or canal onto higher ground, built as a long wooden pole balanced on a pivot with a bucket hung from a rope at one end and a counterweight, often a lump of clay or stone, fixed at the other; an operator pulls the bucket end down into the water and then lets the counterweight do most of the work of swinging the filled bucket back up and over to empty it into a channel or basin. The earliest evidence for the shadoof is a cylindrical seal from ancient Mesopotamia depicting one, dated to around 2200 BC, and the device had reached Upper Egypt by sometime after 2000 BC, most likely during the country's Eighteenth Dynasty, with tomb paintings at Thebes from around 1250 BC showing shadoofs in use; it reached China at roughly the same period. The shadoof remains in everyday use today in rural parts of Africa and Asia, especially in India and Pakistan, and survives as a traditional tool in parts of Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and Germany as well.