The Albolafia Waterwheel on the Guadalquivir at Córdoba
The Albolafia, a noria on the Guadalquivir beside the Roman bridge at Córdoba. Wheels of this kind raised river water into an aqueduct feeding the caliphal palace; the present structure is a reconstruction of a machine recorded on the site from the twelfth century.
Al-Andalus did not invent the waterwheel, but it assembled the pieces — the noria, the qanat, the acequia, the water clock, the fulling and paper mills — into an irrigation and power system that supported crops and populations northern Europe could not match. The vocabulary followed the technology into Spanish and from there into English. When Christian kingdoms took these territories they generally kept the works and the water courts that governed them, because nothing they had was better. See technological innovation and social change in medieval Islamic Spain.
CC BY 2.0 — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
.jpg){kind=link}