Windmills in Kiev, Ukraine

Historical Windmills (Wikipedia.org)


The first practical windmills had sails that rotated in a horizontal plane, around a vertical axis.[8] They were invented in eastern Persia (what is now Afghanistan), as recorded by the Persian geographer Estakhri in the 9th century.[9][10] The authenticity of an earlier anecdote of a windmill involving the second caliph Umar (AD 634–644) is questioned on the grounds that it appears in a 10th-century document.[11] Made of six to twelve sails covered in reed matting or cloth material, these windmills were used to grind grain or draw up water, and were quite different from the later European vertical windmills. Windmills were in widespread use across the Middle East and Central Asia, and later spread to China and India from there.[12]
A similar type of horizontal windmill with rectangular blades, used for irrigation, can also be found in 13th-century China (during the Jurchen Jin Dynasty in the north), introduced by the travels of Yelü Chucai to Turkestan in 1219.[13]