The Nilometer

Overview

Al-Masudi describes the Nile gauge and what its cubits indicate. The Nile's rise begins in the months of Baunah, Abib, and Masra. When it reaches sixteen cubits, the land tax is complete and the land is fertile, and the full rises are seventeen. ²

When it reaches eighteen, a quarter of the land of Egypt is flooded and this is harmful, and if it rises further, a plague occurs. It reached nineteen cubits in the year 99 AH, in the caliphate of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz. ²

The two cubits at which water is drawn are the thirteenth and the fourteenth, and they are called "munkar" and "nakir" (Munkar and Nakir). The four canals are opened on the feast of the Cross. ²

Wells (fiqh of wells)

For the jurists a well (pl. abar) is a subject with rules on its water: its purity, the protected zone around it when dead land is revived, the public claim on its water, and the threshold of abundance. The Kuwaiti encyclopedia states each question with its attributed positions: the Hanafis and Hanbalis set the protected zone in cubits, while the Malikis and Shafi'is measure it by what does not narrow the water's access or the animals' resting places. On whether the public has a claim to a well's water there are two positions, one granting it and one making the water the owner's alone; the pages read present both without choosing between them.

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Wells (fiqh of wells)