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Shushtar Historical Hydraulic System
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How it came to be
The Shushtar Historical Hydraulic System is a set of weirs, bridges, canals and mills that divide the water of the Karun River and carry it to the town of Shushtar and its fields, in Khuzestan in south-western Iran. Its origins are traced to Darius the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty in the 5th century BCE, and it took its present form under the Sasanians in the 3rd century CE.
Its key structure was the Band-e Kaisar, Caesar's Dam, a weir about 500 m long that also carried a bridge. Persian tradition holds that it was built by the soldiers of the Roman emperor Valerian, captured by Shapur I at the Battle of Edessa in 260. The story was written down by the historians Tabari and Masudi in the 9th and 10th centuries, and its details cannot be taken at face value.
The Gargar canal, which branches off the river, still supplies the town and drives mills through tunnels. South of the town about 40,000 ha of the plain between the canals, known as Mianâb, are irrigated as orchards and fields. The Band-e Kaisar stayed in use until the late 19th century, and the system became Iran's 10th World Heritage site in 2009.
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