Qasr Ibn Hubayrah

Qasr Ibn Hubayrah was a city of medieval Iraq, north of Hillah and Babylon. It was briefly the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, under the caliphs As-Saffah and Al-Mansur, before the construction of Baghdad.[1]

History

The name Qasr Ibn Hubayrah means "the castle or palace of Ibn Hubayra", referring to the city's founder, Yazid ibn Umar al-Fazari. He had been governor of Iraq under the Umayyad caliph Marwan II, but died before his palace was completed. The first Abbasid caliph, As-Saffah, oversaw its completion, then took up residence there. As-Saffah named it Hashimiyah after his ancestor, Hashim, but the name never achieved widespread use.[1]

A city quickly grew up around the new capital, and it continued to prosper even after Al-Mansur moved the capital to the new city of Baghdad. In the 10th century, Qasr Ibn Hubayrah was the largest town on the road between Baghdad and Kufa. It stood on a canal called the Nahr Abu Raḥā, or "the canal of the mill", which formed a loop off the side of the Nahr Sura. Al-Muqaddasi noted that the city had a large population, with good markets and a large Jewish population. The city's Friday mosque was in the marketplace.[1]

By the early 1100s, however, Qasr Ibn Hubayrah had been eclipsed by the rise of Hillah to the south, and at some point fell into ruin. Its precise location is unknown, although Guy Le Strange posited that it was "doubtless one of the numerous ruins which lie a few miles due north of the great mounds of ancient Babylon".[1] McGuire Gibson located Qasr Ibn Hubaira somewhere in the vicinity of the present Hindiya Barrage.[2]

Sources
  • Gibson, McGuire (1972). The City and Area of Kish. Miami: Field Research Projects. pp. 53–55, 155.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Le Strange, Guy (1905). The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. OCLC 458169031.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

References
  1. Le Strange 1905, pp. 70–71.
  2. Gibson 1972, p. 55.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.