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Tagged “water-engineering”

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  Chan Chan

  How did the Chimú raise the largest earthen city on Earth — roughly 20 square kilometers of adobe palaces, tapering earthquake-resistant walls, and marine friezes — and keep tens of thousands of people alive in one of the driest deserts on the planet, where it almost never rains?

  c. 850–1470 CE (Chimú kingdom of Chimor) · Chan Chan, near Trujillo, La Libertad Region, PeruAdded July 2026
• 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