What was baghdad

Without this chapter in history, the inheritance of antiquity would likely have followed tortured paths to the present. Paul M Cobb University of Pennsylvania. Whatever for? The various possible answers to that question, it turns out, tell us an awful lot about Islamic civilization in the early Middle Ages, the glory of Baghdad at its height, and the history of relations between the Islamic world and the West.

Using this well-traveled elephant as our guide, then, Professor Cobb explores the foreign yet familiar world of Baghdad in its Golden Age. Using medieval and Middle Eastern instruments, the group will present traditional Iraqi songs, early medieval melodies of the Armenians and Eastern Jews, medieval European songs that reference the city, and improvised music. Then, Islam was a young religion still defining itself; imperial models about Islamic thought were often challenged.

Thus began a centuries-long interest in translating from Greek, Syriac, and other languages into Arabic, and later Persian. Abbasid courtly culture, adab , fostered learning about poetry, oratory, grammar, non-Muslim civilizations, and the history of the pre-Islamic Arabs. Accelerating this revolution in literacy advanced by Arabs, Jews, Christians, and others was the paradigm-changing introduction from China of paper.

In Abbasid Baghdad we find, in addition to philosophy, law, and literature, the medieval foundations of science, medicine and mathematics constituting intellectual and literary links between the modern world and the distant past. Margaret Larkin UC Berkeley. The well-known collection of popular stories known as The Thousand and One Nights , most famously associated with Harun al-Rashid and the golden age of Baghdad, is a composite work that blends the inherited tales of India and Persia with the indigenous story and textual traditions of Syria, Egypt, and Iraq.

Art and Architecture during the Golden Age of Islam. Patricia Blessing Stanford. This lecture discusses the arts and architecture of Islam during the Abbasid period, beginning with the foundation of Baghdad in to the Mongol conquest of the city in This trajectory will show the capitals of the Abbasid caliphs, Raqqa, Baghdad, and Samarra; the ceramics and rich stucco decoration that were produced in the latter city; book paintings that emerged in the Iraqi city of Wasit in the early 13th century; and illustrations of the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in late 13th-century manuscripts.

During this time, in Baghdad, Christians and Shia were tolerated, while Sunnis were treated as enemies. The sack of Baghdad put an end to the Abbasid Caliphate, a blow from which the Islamic civilization never fully recovered.

At this point, Baghdad was ruled by the Ilkhanate, a breakaway state of the Mongol Empire, ruling from Iran. When his forces took Baghdad, he spared almost no one, and ordered that each of his soldiers bring back two severed human heads.

In , Baghdad was captured by the Ottoman Turks. Under the Ottomans , Baghdad continued into a period of decline, partially as a result of the enmity between its rulers and Iranian Safavids, which did not accept the Sunni control of the city.

Between and , it returned to Iranian rule before falling back into Ottoman hands. Baghdad has suffered severely from visitations of the plague and cholera, and sometimes two-thirds of its population has been wiped out.

For a time, Baghdad had been the largest city in the Middle East. The city saw relative revival in the latter part of the 18th century under a Mamluk government. The Nuttall Encyclopedia reports the population of Baghdad as , In , Baghdad became the capital of the British Mandate of Mesopotamia and after receiving independence in , the capital of the Kingdom of Iraq.

The city's population grew from an estimated , in to , in During the Mandate, Baghdad's substantial Jewish community comprised a quarter of the city's population. During the s, Baghdad experienced a period of prosperity and growth because of a sharp increase in the price of petroleum, Iraq's main export.

New infrastructure including modern sewerage, water, and highway facilities were built during this period. However, the Iran—Iraq War of the s was a difficult time for the city, as money was diverted by Saddam Hussein to the army and thousands of residents were killed. Iran launched a number of missile attacks against Baghdad in retaliation for Saddam Hussein's continuous bombardments of Tehran's residential districts. In and , the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq caused significant damage to Baghdad's transportation, power , and sanitary infrastructure as the US-led coalition forces launched massive aerial assaults in the city in the two wars.

Also in , the minor riot in the city which took place on 21 July caused some disturbance in the population. The community has been subject to kidnappings, death threats, vandalism, and house burnings by Alqaida and other insurgent groups. As of the end of , only 1, Assyrians remained in Dora. Points of interest include the National Museum of Iraq whose priceless collection of artifacts was looted during the invasion, and the iconic Hands of Victory arches.

Multiple Iraqi parties are in discussions as to whether the arches should remain as historical monuments or be dismantled. Thousands of ancient manuscripts in the National Library were destroyed under Saddam 's command.

It is the historic center of Baghdadi book-selling, a street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls. It was named after the 10th-century classical Iraqi poet Al-Mutanabbi. This street is well established for bookselling and has often been referred to as the heart and soul of the Baghdad literacy and intellectual community. The zoological park used to be the largest in the Middle East. Within eight days following the invasion, however, only 35 of the animals in the facility survived.

This was a result of theft of some animals for human food, and starvation of caged animals that had no food. South African Lawrence Anthony and some of the zoo keepers cared for the animals and fed the carnivores with donkeys they had bought locally.

Eventually, L. Many Shi'ites travel to the mosque from far away places to commemorate. Just as Kadhimiyyah is a predominantly Shi'ite neighborhood with a Mosque that is associated with Shi'ite Imams , A'dhamiyyah is a predominantly Sunni area with a Mosque that is associated with the Sunni Imam Abu Hanifah.

The city is located on a vast plain bisected by the River Tigris. The Tigris splits Baghdad in half, with the eastern half being called 'Risafa' and the Western half known as 'Karkh'.

The land on which the city is built is almost entirely flat and low-lying, being of alluvial origin due to the periodic large floods which have occurred on the river. Baghdad's record highest temperature of degrees Fahrenheit 51 degrees Celsius was reached in July Winters boast mild days and chilly nights. From December to February, Baghdad has maximum temperatures averaging Morning temperatures can be chilly: the average January low is 3.

Annual rainfall, almost entirely confined to the period from November to March, averages around mm 5. On 11 January , light snow fell across Baghdad for the first time in memory. Baghdad has always played a significant role in the broader Arab cultural sphere, contributing several significant writers, musicians and visual artists. The dialect of Arabic spoken in Baghdad today differs from that of other large urban centres in Iraq, having features more characteristic of nomadic Arabic dialects Verseegh, The Arabic Language.

It is possible that this was caused by the repopulating of the city with rural residents after the multiple sacks of the late Middle Ages. For poetry written about Baghdad, see Reuven Snir ed. It had grown to become the world's largest city just 50 years after the first brick was laid, with some estimates putting its population at more than 1 million. As a young man, he memorised the Qur'an, studied the history of early Islam, recited poetry and mastered the newly maturing discipline of Arabic grammar.

He also studied arithmetic and its applications in the calculation of taxes. Most importantly, he was a brilliant student of philosophy and theology, or more specifically what is referred to in Arabic as kalam , which is a form of dialectic debate and argument. It is even quite likely that by the early 9th century, some of their work had already been translated into Arabic. Every week, guests would be invited to the palace, wined and dined, and then begin to discuss with the caliph all manner of scholarly subjects, from theology to mathematics.

He would send emissaries great distances to get hold of ancient scientific texts: one, Salman, visited Constantinople to obtain Greek texts from the Emperor Leo V Leo the Armenian. Often, defeated foreign rulers would be required to settle the terms of surrender to him with books from their libraries rather than in gold. The institution he created to realise his dream epitomises more than anything else the blossoming of the scientific golden age. It became known throughout the world as the House of Wisdom Bayt al-Hikma.

No physical trace remains of this academy today, so we cannot be sure exactly where it was located or what it looked like. But whatever its function — and many of Baghdad's scholars may not have been based physically within it — there is no doubt that the House of Wisdom has acquired a mythical status symbolising this golden age, on a par with the Library of Alexandria, 1, years earlier. The House of Wisdom grew rapidly with the acquisition of texts from Greece, Persia and India, swelling with the addition of the Arabic translations of these texts, a process that was already becoming an industry in Baghdad.

This growth would have gathered pace with the use of paper, the production of which the Arabs had learnt from Chinese prisoners of war, as a new and cheaper writing material replacing papyrus and parchment. The translators would have had scribes recording their work and producing multiple copies of each text. By the middle of the ninth century, Baghdad had become the centre of the civilised world, attracting the very best of Arab and Persian philosophers and scientists for several centuries to come.

He would spend many years travelling around the world in his search for Greek manuscripts. It is the medical work of the physician Galen that is his most important legacy, for not only did it open up the Islamic world to this great treasure, in many cases it is only via these Arabic translations that much of Galen's work reaches us today. The eldest, Mohammad, is said to have been the first person to suggest that celestial bodies such as the moon and planets were subject to the same laws of physics as on Earth — which marked a clear break from the received Aristotelian picture of the universe.

Indeed his book, Astral Motion and the Force of Attraction , shows clear signs that he had a crude qualitative notion of such a force, albeit a far cry from Newton's universal law of gravity. The brothers are probably best known for their wonderful inventions and engineering projects.