Sep 4, 2024
In this episode we discuss what is perhaps the most famous and distinctive invention of Middle Eastern and North African hydraulic engineering is the qanāt (also known as foggaras, khettāras, and aflāj): an underground tunnel dug horizontally into a hillside to harvest water from the water table.
Speakers:...
Aug 1, 2024
It is often difficult to reconstruct the water infrastructure at historical sites due to recent building and patchy excavation and survival. In this episode we look at a site in which we can see a great deal of the water supply as a connected system, and how it developed over time: the great late antique White Monastery...
Jul 1, 2024
You can’t think about clean water without also thinking about removing dirty water and other waste. In this episode we take a deep dive into sewage (figuratively speaking) on the basis of excavations and documents that survive about cities in Muslim Spain in the Middle Ages.
Speaker: Ieva Rèklaityte. Interviewer:...
Jun 1, 2024
Medieval Baghdad was probably home to 200,000 to 500,000 inhabitants. In this episode we look at how water functioned as the life blood of this great city, providing drink, but also transportation that supplied the city with food and connected it with...
May 2, 2024
The bathhouse is an iconic feature of the medieval middle eastern city up until the present. But how did this come to be? In this episode we look into the origins of bathing culture in the Middle East by going back to the Roman, late antique and early Islamic development of bathhouses.
Speakers: Nathalie de Haan and...