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Tagged “irrigation”

• HIGH WONDER

  The Qanats of Gonabad

  How did Iron Age well-diggers, working by lamplight with hand picks and a rope windlass, sink a shaft roughly 300 metres into the desert and then drive a tunnel some 33 kilometres back to the surface — holding a gradient of a fraction of a percent the whole way, underground, with no way to see where they were going?

  c. 700-500 BCE, Achaemenid era (traditionally attributed to a legendary king centuries earlier) · Gonabad, Razavi Khorasan Province, IranAdded September 2026
• HIGH WONDER

  Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras

  How did the Ifugao sculpt tens of thousands of hectares of self-watering terraces into near-vertical mountainsides using only wood and stone hand tools, and are these rice fields two thousand years old, or barely four hundred?

  Traditionally dated to c. 1st century CE; recent radiocarbon work argues for c. 1600 CE (disputed) · Ifugao Province, Cordillera, Luzon, PhilippinesAdded July 2026