The ‘ara-ghatta’ or rope-pot system of lifting water from open wells was probably invented in erstwhile India of the past. With its use in Iran and perhaps its discovery there it came to be called thePersian wheel.

Thearaghatta itself became theRahat orreghat orgharat in North India. Ubiquitous everywhere in India it has all but disappeared with the lowering of the water table in many parts of India and the coming of the diesel and electric pump. As a device it is my surmise that the pulley which became the wheel was first discovered around water. The well itself is a remarkable discovery. A hole in the ground which yields water allowed mankind to ‘conquer’ the open spaces and unyoke itself from the tyranny of being tied to rivers and lakes. The Persian wheel still exists in some parts of remote India and with its disappearance will go a water culture and history. Here Avinash plays the Araghattikka , the person working the Araghatta. Usually bullocks, elephants or camels did the job of moving in circles to lift water.

The biggest confusion amongst authors and people is between the Water wheel and the Persian wheel. The water wheel-the noria- is perhaps an Egyptian invention and is stream or river based water lifting device and a water mill at times.

In the above the Noria or the water wheel is a water mill and not a water lifting device. It uses the strength of the current to move and to translate that to a grinding action.

The Persian wheel is thesaqia and is a land based water lifting device from wells, more in the nature of a pump. In fact in parts of Kolar in Karnataka it is called a ‘bucket pump’.

As ground water levels decline in India Persian Wheels cannot reach the water to draw them out from open wells. One such Persian wheel stands forlorn and frustrated as the water table has dipped in Kolar Karnataka India. This wheel has worked for the last 80 years and 2007 was the first time that the water table fell so low that the wheel could not work for day. A nearby open well which draws copious water with an electric pump is suspected of causing the dip. The Rainwater Club works with farmers to ensure efficient use of water and allow the Persian wheel- a symbol of sustainable and carbon free water use- to continue its existence as a living, century old water culture of India.

Ananda K Coomaraswamy argues in his monograph The Persian Wheel argues that it is not justified to draw its origins to Persia. Its mention in the Panchatantra and the Rajatarangini as the cakka-vattakka or the ghati yantra.

The FAO document on water lifting devices is an excellent one to compare the efficiencies of various lifting devices for water

”’http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ah810e/AH810E08.htm#Fig.%2026 As it states

The Persian wheel, is a great improvement on the mohte, as its chain of buckets imposes an almost constant load on the drive shaft to the wheel. Persian wheels are usually driven by some form of right angle drive. The first is the most common, where the drive shaft from the secondary gear is buried and the animals walk over it; this has the advantage of keeping the Persian wheel as low as possible to minimise the head through which water is lifted. The second example is a traditional wooden Persian wheel mechanism where the animal passes under the horizontal shaft. The sweep of a Persian wheel carries an almost constant load and therefore the animal can establish a steady comfortable pace and needs little supervision.”

Noria and Saqiya: 

Needham, inScience and Civilisation, Vol. IV(2), gave a clear definition of the two forms, thenoria having the containers fixed to the rim of the wheel, and thesaqiya on the rope or chain flung over the wheel (p. 356). Having done so, he was able to follow up the evidence gathered by Coomaraswamy and Laufer, and argue that the earliest water-wheel in India was thenoria, and that, moreover, India was probably the country of origin of this device. The reasons Needham adduced for this conclusion were two-fold: first of all, thenoria was in the Hellenistic world in the first century BC and in China in the second century AD, and this proximity of date in such distant civilisations suggested an intermediate source of diffusion. Secondly, he located the earliest recorded reference (derived presumably from Coomaraswamy) to the noria in the termcakkavattaka (turning wheel) used in theCullavagga Nikaya (assigned to ca. 350 BC) for one of the three permissible models of water-lift.  Source: D.P.Agarwal Needham on Early Indian Inventions of Hydraulics, Cotton-Gins and Alcohol Distillation