Lifting water can increase the area that can be farmed, improve agricultural productivity, and provide drinking water. A Persian Wheel lifts water with animal or human power when there is insufficient flow for a noria. The animal energy was often supplied by a team of oxen.
The Persian wheel may have been invented in Persia, Egypt, Kush (Sudan), Nubia, India, or even China. The earliest reference is found in the Panchatantra (c. 3rd century BCE), where it was known as an araghaṭṭa a combination of the words ara (spoked wheel) and ghaṭṭa “pot” in Sanskrit.
Early Mediterranean evidence of a saqiya is from a tomb painting in Ptolemaic Egypt that dates to the 2nd century BCE. A preserved 2nd century CE wheel raised water from a well in London. The invention may also have been refined or developed in China, credited to Pi Lan and Ma kün about ~200 CE. The Persian wheel may have reached India around the thirteenth or fourteenth century in the wake of the Turkish conquests of northern India. Animal-powered saqiyas and water-powered norias have been supplying water in Damascus (Syria) since the 13th century.
The Persian wheel was well known in the Middle East and in everyday use throughout the area. It was called a sāqiyah, sakia, saqia, or saqiya (Arabic: ساقية), Persian wheel, tablia, rahat (Punjabi), tympanum (Latin), antelayyā wheel (Aramaic), rahat रहट or araghattta (Sanskrit), aceña or noria de sangre (Spain), and fan ch’o (China). The Arabic word saqiya (Arabic: ساقية) is derived from the root verb saqa (Arabic: سقى), meaning to “give to drink” or “make (someone/something) drink.”
These devices were once in widespread use in China, India, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt and other countries. Persian wheels are still used but they have been almost entirely been replaced by electric pumps. Records note that at one time 25,000 Persian wheels were turning in the Kolar District of India. Sadly, the last one recently stopped, displaced by an electric pump.
Hand and foot energy is applied directly to a scoop wheel. Clay pots or buckets attached directly to the periphery of the wheel limit the depth it can scoop water from to less than half its diameter.
When more water is needed animal power turns a lever as the animals walks around and around. The long lever arm is attached to a vertical gear shaft. The vertical shaft rotation is transformed to a horizontal shaft rotation with lantern gears (also called cage gears or lantern pinions). These artisanal gears were traditionally made of wood with cylindrical rods or pegs for teeth, parallel to the axle and arranged in a circle around it.
Lantern gears are more efficient than solid pinion gears and good for rural use because dirt can fall through the rods rather than becoming trapped and increasing wear or jamming the gear. The lantern gears can be constructed with very simple tools as the teeth are not formed by cutting or milling metal, but rather by shaping wood, drilling holes and inserting wooden rods. The rods are wedged in place and can be adjusted or replaced as the gears wear. Building and maintaining a Persian wheel with crooked timbers and limited supplies required very skilled workers. Later on the gears and axles could be metal and the scoops could be made with sheet metal.
The Persian wheel is an innovative, effective, and low cost method for lifting water from a well, a river when a noria can’t be used, ponds or water bodies. The use of draft animals increases the volume of water that can be lifted for use. Although a few are still in use, almost everyone has switched to electric pumps. They are more convenient until the electricity fails.
Widespread power grid failures in Pakistan 2023, Portugal and Spain 2025, India 2023, India 2012, Bangladesh 2012, Syria 2025, Puerto Rico 2025, Egypt 2024, US 2003, and Iraq 2025 put people and crops at risk. The increasing vulnerability with climate change suggests it might be good to restore and install Persian wheels as a backup source of water.
