JOURNAL
OF
THE ASIATIC SOCIETY.
No. 15—March, 1833.
I.—On the Restoration of the Ancient Canals in the Delhi Territory. By Major Colvin, Engineers.
[Extracted from that Officer's Report to Government as Superintendent of Canals.]
I. THE CANAL OF FEROZ SHAH.
The original branch of the canals lately re-opened, to the west of the Jamna, was excavated under Feroz Shah, about the middle of the fourteenth century. The neighbourhood of Hissar was his favorite hunting ground, where he evidently must have passed much time, attended by his court, if we may judge from the extensive ruins of buildings and tombs still existing, and occupying a space of several square miles, all attributed to that period; the advantages of an abundance of good water for so large an assemblage, in a country of such extreme aridity, where the wells are 130 feet deep, and the springs often salt, may have been the principal incentive to this great undertaking.
Probability and tradition point out the head of the original canal to have been where it now is, immediately at the point where the Jamna issues from the lower range of hills, and nearly opposite to another hunting seat of the same emperor, marked in the maps as Bádsháh Mahal; from whence it was apparently conducted along one of the many old water-courses of the Jamna, till it fell into what was then the mouth of the Súmbe river[1]. This channel, under the operation of time and floods now become the western branch of the Jamna, was then probably
- ↑ A mountain-torrent nearly dry, except in the rains, when it receives the drainage of the mountains south-east of Nahun, and of the plains east of its course, nearly to the Jamna, from which and a strong fall, its floods are most violent and sudden in their effects.
