THE NORIAS OF HAMA ARE A SERIES of 17 NORIAS, HISTORIC WATER-RESISTANT MACHINES FOR IRRIGATION, ALONG THE ORONTES RIVER IN HAMA, SYRIA

The Norias of Hama are a series of 17 norias, historic water-raising machines for irrigation, along the Orontes River in Hama, Syria. They are notable for their medieval origins and for the enormous size of two of them, which were for nearly 500 years the tallest waterwheels in the world.

This is a rather interesting post for me! In Guadalajara, Mexico, back in the early or mid 1980's my cousin and I, playing around in his parents home dug a hole somewhere in the backyard of his home. At one point in time my cousin and I dug around maybe 3 or 4 feet deep and made a small rectangle shape hole on the dirt.  

Supposedly we were digging for treasures then. Anyway, as we dug further down the ground got a bit too hard for us kids to dig using a simple shovel, so we began to dig sideways. It was rather interesting on what we found buried in that ground too. We found old pieces of clothing, a really oxidized belt buckle, some sort of canine tooth, and just odd black stones that were shiny when you first saw them on the ground but would immediately dull once you handled them. At one point in time we hit what looked like a brick wall.

 

These bricks were not your standard sized bricks either. They were larger in size and appeared to have been made of stone or some other hard material. We must have uncovered a good 5 feet of dirt of this stone and the brick wall seemed to continue on either way. Rather than continue digging we actually decided to remove one of these bricks, that's how we were able to see how large and heavy these things were, and when we removed the brick all we can observe inside was pitch black darkness followed by an occasional feel of wind coming from the hole. We managed to grab a flash light from my cousin's home but it was futile, there was nothing that we can could really see from this hole, it was just pitch black across.

 At one point in time, I grabbed a big chunk of rock, poked it through the opening released the rock to hear how deep it fell. It was a few seconds before hearing the rock hit, and surprisingly too it made a splash, as if it hit a body of water below. It was at this point in time where my cousin and I excitedly ran back into his house to tell his parents what we had found. Lucky for us, my grandfather had actually decided to visit on this day too, and he immediately cautioned us to stop digging, fill that hole back up again, and shared the story with us that at one point in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico the city had many "Norias." He explained to us that Norias were big holes on the ground where the locals back then were able to go and retrieve water from.

  He couldn't recall if the property had had one or not, for he was present when his deceased relative built the home, but for the safety of us he just instructed us to completely stop. I always wondered what other things could have had been found in that home. The good thing is that now my cousin is the only one that lives there, everyone else has passed on. Maybe some day, it would be nice to learn the history of that home site.