User:Bichonas/Round city of Baghdad

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Modern References on the "Discovering" of the Round City of Baghdad
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. " The book is illustrative of the kind of Orientalist studies such as this one, which enjoyed great popularity in Europe at the time, fostered interest in conducting surveys in situ.

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 1905-1913 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," 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 Round City's suspected site has left the task of reconstructing the Medinat al-Mansur as a mere theoretical and hypothetical exercise. The topic was again revisited in the second half of the 20th century in new contexts. One of the more recent scholars who has undertaken the subject again 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 beginnings 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 our current 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." 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. 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."  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.''"