Shūshtar

Shushtar stands where the Karun River leaves the Zagros for the Khuzestan plain. Its remarkable hydraulic works divide and direct the river through canals, tunnels, dams and mills. The Gargar canal carries water to a cascade of mills, while the great Shadorvan bridge-dam raised the river for irrigation. Downstream, channels watered the orchards and fields of the Mianab plain; Salasel Castle helped control the system.

The works were maintained and extended over many centuries. Safavid and Qajar rulers repaired the Gargar bridge-dam and the great Shadorvan weir, preserving structures on which the city's water and agriculture depended. Shushtar was also a centre of Mandaean religious life and scholarship: manuscripts copied there in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries bear witness to a community whose rituals were closely connected with flowing water.