reservoirs and qanats. Jean Chardin the French explorer who made two long journeys to Iran at this time, reports that: “the Iranians rip the foothills in search of water, and when they find any, by means of qanats they transfer this water to a distance of 50 or 60 kilometers or sometimes further downstream. No nation in the world can compete with the Iranians in recovering and transferring groundwater. They make use of groundwater in irrigating their farmlands, and they construct qanats almost everywhere and always succeed in extracting groundwater.” The dynasty of Qajar ruled Iran from the 16th century to the early 18th century. According to Goblot, the time of Qajar can be considered as the heyday of qanats, for the qanats could flourish. Agha Mohammad Khan the founder of the Qajar dynasty chose Tehran as his capital city, a city where there was no access to a reliable stream of surface water and it had to rely on groundwater. The rich supply of groundwater and suitable geological-topographical conditions of Tehran allowed this city to house many qanats whose total discharge amounted to 2000 liters per second. Haj Mirza Aghasi (ruling between 1834 and 1848), the prime minister of the third king of the Qajar dynasty, encouraged and supported qanat construction throughout the country . Jaubert de Passa who surveyed the situation of irrigation in Iran reported a population of 50,000 in Hamedan, 200,000 in Isfahan and 130,000 in Tehran in the year 1840. Then he claims that in these cities life is indebted to the qanats which are being constructed in a simple but powerful manner. In a nutshell, the period of Qajar that lasted about 1.5 centuries witnessed considerable endeavors to revive and build new qanats. During the Pahlavi period, the process of qanat construction and maintenance continued. A council that was responsible for the qanats was set up by the government. At that time most of the qanats belonged to landlords. In fact, feudalism was the prevailing system in the rural regions. The peasants were not entitled to the lands they worked on, but were considered only as the users of the lands. They had to pay rent for land and water to the landlords who could afford to finance all the proceedings required to maintain the qanats, for they were relatively wealthy. According to the report of Safi Asfiya, who was in charge of supervising