The Digging of the Anbar Canal

حفر نهر الأنبار

In al-Baladhuri: Anbar's dihqans asked Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas to dig them a canal they had already asked Persia's lord to dig; he wrote to Sa'd ibn Amr ibn Haram ordering it dug — the men dug until reaching a mountain that could not be cut, and left it. When al-Hajjaj governed Iraq he gathered labourers from every quarter and told his overseers 'see what a digger eats in a day — if it weighs what he hews out, do not hold back from digging,' and they spent on it till finished; that mountain was named for al-Hajjaj and the river for Sa'd ibn Amr ibn Haram. Al-Khayzuran, mother of the caliphs, ordered the canal called Mahdud dug — she named it al-Rayyan — her agent dividing it into sections, each section bounded and a crew assigned to dig it, whence 'Mahdud'; as for the river called Shayla, the sons of Shayla ibn Farrukhzadhan al-Marwazi claim Sapur dug it for their grandfather when he installed him as nighya of Anbar's tassuj — while others say it was named for a man called Shayla who contracted its digging and held a mabqala over it in al-Mansur's days, the canal having been long buried.