Year: 1962
Type: article
Abstract: THE CAPITAL OF IRAQ, with its suburban areas, represents a city of some one million inhabitants.Both its size and its long history of continuous habitation make it one of t~e few most important cities in the Middle East for the study of the system applied to its street names over the last millinum.Whether the names for the streets represent a typical l\1iddle Eastern city, we shall not know until more comparative studies are made, of which the present one is offered as a start.In the year 712 A.D. Caliph Mansour founded the city, laid out governmental buildings in a circular order on the west side of the Tigris River, and made it the capital of the Abbasside Caliphate.This so-called Round City, the modern Shalchiya area, had four straight streets corresponding roughly to the cardinal points of the compass, leading from the center.Very quickly business and residential sections sprang up on the outside of the walls of the Round City.Shortly after the initial founding, the Caliph built a palace on the east bank, called the Persian side of the Tigris, or Ral?afa.On both sides the subsidiary streets bore the names of the owners of adjoining property.!The descriptions given by several capable geographers and travelers of the early periods remain to us, and from these reports Guy Le Strange, in 1900, reconstructed the arrangement of the city at different times over a period of some 400 years and identified some of the names with parts of his reconstruction.From this description and others less cogent to this study we recognize certain patterns or cycles in the life of different sections of the city, both a natural growth and decline and a cycle hastened by floods and war damage.
Source: Names
Author: Jack Autrey Dabbs
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2004207936