With the Orontes river running between grassy banks and orchards it's hard to imagine that only 40km or so east of Hama one is in the desert. This picture was taking in the spring when the river was quite high - when I returned in october it was much less attractive.
The norias for which Hama is famous date back to medieval times and were built solely of irrigation. Unlike a water mill, the wheel does not drive any machinery. Instead it has wooden boxes mounted around the rim which scoop water up from the river and carry up to the top where it cascades into a trough alongside the wheel and is carried by aquaducts (such as the one visible to the left of this picture) and pipes to the fields to irrigate crops or even to provide domestic water supplies.