Round city of Baghdad

Coordinates: 33°20′51″N 44°20′06″E / 33.34750°N 44.33500°E / 33.34750; 44.33500
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The City of Peace / Al-Mansur City
مدينة السلام
Baghdad under the early Abbasid caliphs, with the Round City
Round city of Baghdad is located in Iraq
Round city of Baghdad
Shown within Iraq
Alternative nameThe City of Peace / Al-Mansur
LocationBaghdad, Iraq
Coordinates33°20′51″N 44°20′06″E / 33.34750°N 44.33500°E / 33.34750; 44.33500
TypeSettlement

The Round City of Baghdad is the original core of

Arabic: مدينة السلام, romanized: Madīnat as-Salām). The famous library known as the House of Wisdom
was located within its grounds.

Description

The Round City of Baghdad, reconstructed by Guy Le Strange (1900)

According to Ya'qubi, the plans for the city were drawn up, but it was not until 2 August 762 that construction began, under the supervision of four architects.[1] Huge resources were amassed for the project: the Arab chroniclers report 100,000 workers and craftsmen, and sums of 18 million gold dinars or 100 million silver dirhams.[2] The caliphal Palace of the Golden Gate and the main mosque, as well as some of the administration offices, were apparently completed by 763, allowing al-Mansur to move his residence into the city, and the rest of the Round City was completed by 766.[1]

Mansur believed that Baghdad was the perfect city to be the capital of the Islamic empire under the

Abbasids. Mansur loved the site so much he is quoted saying, "This is indeed the city that I am to found, where I am to live, and where my descendants will reign afterward".[3] The goal was to replace Harran as the seat of the caliphal government; however, a city of Baghdad is mentioned in pre-Islamic texts, including the Talmud,[4]
and the Abbasid city was likely built on the site of this earlier settlement.

Baghdad eclipsed Ctesiphon, the capital of the Sasanian Empire, which was located some 30 km (19 mi) to the southeast, which had been under Muslim control since 637, and which became quickly deserted after the foundation of Baghdad. The site of Babylon, which had been deserted since the 2nd century, lies some 90 km (56 mi) to the south.

The old Baghdad was a small village, and despite its name, which is of

Buyids).[5]

The city was designed as a circle about 1 km (0.62 mi) in radius, leading it to be known as the "Round City". Given this figure, it may be estimated that the original area of the city, shortly after its construction, was around 3 km2 (1.2 sq mi) (However, the historical sources do not agree on the size of the city.

Zoroastrian,[10] and Mashallah ibn Athari
, a Persian Jewish astrologer/astronomer.

The city had

Great Khorasan Road
.

None of the structures of the city has survived, and information are based on literary sources. The caliphal

Mesopotamian architecture.[9]

The residents were of two types: military people who were settled by the caliph, and a large number ordinary people who later settled in the city for economic opportunities. The second group were mostly

abna' of Yemen, also of Persian origin. The Persians of Baghdad were gradually acculturated by the early 9th century.[9]

Modern references to the "discovery" of the Round City

As the host of one of the major intellectual centers in the Abbasid Caliphs, the Grand Library of Baghdad, also known as The House of Wisdom, was likely to have attracted scholars of several disciplines. Among them, geographers, historians, or simple chroniclers provided extensive descriptions of the Madinat al-Mansur even years after the city's fading. All the information we have today related to the physical characteristics, structural functions, and social life in Abbasid Baghdad comes from these literary sources which were revisited in the 20th century. Some of the most important surviving literary sources from the late 10th and 11th centuries in Baghdad are "Description of Mesopotamia and Baghdad," written by Ibn Serapion; "Tarikh Baghdad (A History of Baghdad)", by the scholar and historian Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, and the "Geographical Dictionary" by the geographer and historian Ya'qubi. These three books have constituted the foundation and required reading for modern research on the matter.

The definite revelation for the academic community of the existence of the Round City of Baghdad was recorded by Guy Le Strange, a British Orientalist prominent in the field of historical geography. His work "Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate: from contemporary Arabic and Persian sources," (1900) revisited, among other scholars, the work of Serapion and Ya'qubi to reconstruct a plan of the old city. Le Strange himself wrote in the preface of his book:

"(...) the real basis of the present reconstruction of the medieval plan is the description of the Canals of Baghdad written by Ibn Serapion in about the year a.d. 900. By combining the network of the water system, as described by this writer, with the radiating high-roads, as described by his contemporary Yakubi, it has been possible to plot out the various quarters of older Baghdad, filling in details from the accounts of other authorities, which, taken alone, would have proved too fragmentary to serve for any systematic reconstruction of the plan."[13]

A few years after Le Strange's first publication of the Round City's plan, a wave of German and British excavations was commissioned by emerging museums and universities. Two scholars re-re-visited the topic while working in Iraq, conducting excavations in neighboring cities like Samarra. The first one to improve Le Strange's initial plan was Ernst Herzfeld, a German archeologist who produced between 1905 and 1913 a large body of work including translations, drawings, field notes, photographs, and objects inventories from his excavations at Samarra and elsewhere in Iraq and Iran. Concerned with the critical problems found in the original descriptive texts, Herzfeld, an architect by profession, offered new interpretations and developed new plans of the Round City of Baghdad. His study was more related to the description, arrangement, and function of the city's main buildings, contrasting with the more urbanistic approach of Le Strange. His reconstructions were celebrated as the first "major architectural work on this subject,"[14] accepted by subsequent scholars. One of them was British art historian Sir K. A. C. Creswell, whose 1932 publication of the first volume of his monumental survey "Early Muslim Architecture" remains widely acknowledged as an essential reference for early Islamic architecture.

The lack of archeological excavations at the surmised location of the Round City means the task of reconstructing the Medinat al-Mansur is mostly a hypothetical exercise. The topic was revisited in the second half of the 20th century in new contexts. One of the more recent scholars who has undertaken the subject is Jacob Lassner, who presented a new critical interpretation based on the original texts "Tarikh Baghdad, (A History of Baghdad)," the "Geographical Dictionary" by al-Baghdadi and Ya'qubi, and the assessments made by Herzfeld and Creswell in the beginning of the 20th century. Lassner's "The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages" (1970) and "The Shaping of Abbasid Rule" (1980) presented a new concept of the city plan and a contrasting view of its architectural function and historical development in the earliest period, improving understanding of the city's design. In Lassner's studies, at least four previously held ideas about the al-Mansur's city were revised.

First, Lassner rejected the idea that al-Mansûr himself, "who had no known experience in architectural design (or with round structures) could have personally created ex nihilo such a sophisticated and unusual design."[15] Second, he argues against the view that Baghdad's building was a sign of the Abbasid assumption of Iranian rulership, being more a visible manifestation of the Abbasid inheritance of Persian Sassanian urban design royal tradition.[15] Third, he rejects the claims that the palace-city had symbolic cosmological significance "simply because there are no explicit statements in the sources connecting the caliph with such symbolism."[15] Finally, he affirms that "The Round City was, in fact, an administrative center, and not at all a city in the conventional sense of the term."[16]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Duri 1960, p. 896.
  2. ^ Duri 1960, pp. 896, 897.
  3. ^ Wiet, Gaston (1971). Baghdad: Metropolis of the Abbasid Caliphate. Univ. of Oklahoma Press.
  4. ^ Ket. 7b, Zeb. 9a
  5. ^ "Welcome to Encyclopaedia Iranica".
  6. OCLC 227024
    .
  7. ^ "Abbasid Ceramics: Plan of Baghdad". Archived from the original on 2004-09-02. Retrieved 2004-09-02.
  8. ^ See:
  9. ^ a b c d Kennedy, H. "BAGHDAD i. Before the Mongol Invasion – Encyclopaedia Iranica". Iranicaonline.org. Retrieved 24 January 2018.
  10. ISBN 0-7486-0457-X
    .
  11. ISBN 9780789209214. {{cite book}}: |first1= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link
    )
  12. ISBN 9781883591038
    .
  13. ^ Guy Le Strange (1900). Baghdad During the Abbasid Caliphate From Contemporary Arabic and Persian Sources. Harvard University. Clarendon Press.
  14. ISBN 978-1-119-06921-8
    .
  15. ^
    JSTOR 23657647
    .
  16. JSTOR 20752346
    .

Sources

External links

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