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 Frroz Suan, about the middle of the 
fourteenth century. The neighbourhood of Hissar was his favorite hunt- 
ing 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 Bddshah 
Mahal ; from whence it was apparently conducted along one of the many 
old water-courses of the Jamaa, till it fell into what was then the mouth 
of the Sdmbe river*. 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 drain- 
age 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. 
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