A noria is a hydropowered machine used to lift water into a small aqueduct, either for the purpose of irrigation or for the use in towns and villages. There is at least one known instance where it feeds seawater into a saltern.
The terms referring to traditional water-raising devices used in the Middle East, India, Spain and other areas are sometimes used rather loosely. The term noria is commonly used for devices using the power of moving water. For devices powered by animals, the usual term is saqiyah or sakia. Other types of similar devices are grouped under the name of chain pumps. In Spain the term noria is used also for devices which are actually saqiyas. A noria proper uses the energy derived from the flow of a river. It consists of a large, very narrow undershot water wheel whose rim is made up of a series of containers which lift water from the river to a very small aqueduct at the top of the wheel.
Functions
The noria performs the function of moving water from a lower elevation to a higher elevation. In this it is similar to the saqiyah and other pumps, but those are generally powered by other means, not by a water wheel. Its concept is similar to the modern hydraulic ram, which also uses the power of flowing water to pump some of the water out of the river. Unlike the water wheels found in watermills, a noria does not provide mechanical power to any other process. A few historical norias were hybrids, consisting of waterwheels assisted secondarily by animal power. A noria can raise water to somewhat less than its full height. The largest noria in the world, with a diameter of about, is in Ḥamāh, Syria.
History
Paddle-driven water-lifting wheels had appeared in ancient Egypt by the 4th century BC. According to John Peter Oleson, both the compartmented wheel and the hydraulic noria appeared in Egypt by the 4th century BC, with the saqiyah being invented there a century later. This is supported by archeological finds in the Faiyum, where the oldest archeological evidence of a water wheel has been found, in the form of a saqiyah dating back to the 3rd century BC. A papyrus dating to the 2nd century BC also found in the Faiyum mentions a water wheel used for irrigation, a 2nd-century BCfresco found at Alexandria depicts a compartmented saqiyah, and the writings of Callixenus of Rhodes mention the use of a saqiyah in the Ptolemaic Kingdom during the reign of Pharaoh Ptolemy IV Philopator in the late 3rd century BC. The undershot water wheel and overshot water wheel, both animal- and water-driven, and with either a compartmented body or a compartmented rim, were used by Hellenistic engineers between the 3rd and 2nd century BC. Around 300, the Romans replaced the wooden compartments with separate, attached ceramic pots that were tied to the outside of an open-framed wheel, thereby creating the noria. During the Islamic Golden Age, norias were adopted from classical antiquity by Muslim engineers, who made improvements to the noria. For example, the flywheel mechanism used to smooth out the delivery of power from a driving device to a driven machine, was invented by ibn Bassal of al-Andalus, who pioneered the use of the flywheel in the noria and saqiyah. In 1206, Ismail al-Jazari introduced the use of the crankshaft in the noria and saqiya, and the concept of minimizing was implied for the purpose of maximising their efficiency. Muslim engineers used norias to discharge water into aqueducts which carried the water to towns and fields. Some of the norias used in the medieval Islamic world were as large as 20 metres in diameter, the norias of Hama being a surviving example still used in modern times. It has 120 water collection compartments and could raise more than 95 litres of water per minute. In the 10th century, Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi's Al-Hawi describes a noria in Iraq that could lift as much as 153,000 litres per hour, or 2550 litres per minute. This is comparable to the output of modern norias in East Asia, which can lift up to 288,000 litres per hour, or 4800 litres per minute.
