Haffar

During the early Islamic centuries, the

Daylam Daylam, also known in the plural form Daylaman (and variants such as Dailam, Deylam, and Deilam), was the name of a mountainous region of inland Gilan, Iran. It was so named for its inhabitants, known as the Daylamites. The Church of the East es ...

ite Buwayhid king, Panah Khusraw Adud ad-Dawlah, ordered the digging of a canal to join the

Karun The Karun ( fa, کارون, ) is the Iranian river with the highest water flow, and its only navigable river. It is long. It rises in the Zard Kuh mountains of the Bakhtiari district in the Zagros Range, receiving many tributaries, such as t ...

River, which at the time emptied independently into the Persian Gulf through the Bahmanshir channel, to the Shatt al-Arab waterway (known as

Arvand Rud The Shatt al-Arab ( ar, شط العرب, lit=River of the Arabs; fa, اروندرود, Arvand Rud, lit=Swift River) is a river of some in length that is formed at the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in the town of al-Qurnah in ...

in Iran), the joint estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The extra water from the

, which, at times during the spring melt, discharged over 27 times the volume of the Tigris-Euphrates water that reaches the Shatt al-Arab) makes the joint estuary more reliably navigable. The estuary thus created was known as the Haffar, Arabic for "excavated," "dug out," which exactly described what the channel was: a man-made canal. The Haffar soon became the main estuary of the Karun, as it is at present, replacing the Bahmanshir. In the 19th century, the port of Muhammarah was built on the Haffar. In the 1930s, the ports was renamed

Khorramshahr Khorramshahr ( fa, خرمشهر , also Romanization, romanized as ''Khurramshahr'', ar, المحمرة, romanized as ''Al-Muhammerah'') is a city and capital of Khorramshahr County, Khuzestan Province, Iran. At the 2016 census, its population wa ...

(q.v.) Rivers of Khuzestan Province Shatt al-Arab basin {{Iran-river-stub