When the Mongols attacked Persia, they destroyed, among other things, the qanat, ancient underground canal works that were, to an agricultural society in a riverless land, life’s blood itself. Some of the qanats were destroyed outright and some filled up with sand and vanished just as surely as if they had been deliberately destroyed because no one was left to repair them. When the Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi wrote a description of western Iran, northern Afghanistan, and the republics north of the Oxus River a few years before the Mongol invasion, he described a fertile, flourishing
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