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Lion of Babylon -> RE: Names of Iraqi cities.. origins & meaning? (7/7/2007 1:57:04 AM)
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SAMARRA
Samarra is the biggest archaeological site in the world: located 125km (60 miles) upstream from Baghdad, its ruins cover a length of nearly 50km along one bank of the Tigris, and 8km at their maximum width. The built-up area extended to about 57km2 of ruins, spread over a region of about 150km2. In total, 6,314 constructions have been registered on the site, only 9 of which “have any meaningful vertical dimension to record” (see Northedge’s article in the Encyclopædia of Islam).
Most of these 9 can be dated to several construction phases within the 56-year period between 836 and 892, when Samarra was the official caliphal residence for the Abbasid Caliph and court retinue, and cantonment for his Turkish troops and guards. The period 836-892, when we know the site was occupied, has been called the “Samarra horizon” (q.v.), and traditionally archaeological finds from the site have been dated to within this short period.
However, the site was occupied much earlier than this: it was the site of a Sasanian settlement, and the major water distribution systems which supplied Samarra to some extent, the Nahrawan canal and the Nahr Isa (which formed the boundaries of the city on the East and West banks of the Tigris), were built by Shah Khusraw Anushirvan in the early C6th. Harun al-Rashid started to build an octagonal walled city, known as al-Qadisiyya, to the south of the city, supposedly when he tired of Baghdad, but it was never finished.
The geographer Yaqut says that a total of 294 million dirhams was spent on the construction of palaces at Samarra, and he lists 19 palaces that al-Mutawakkil supposedly built (however, there is a problem in his text over what counts as a palace). The largest of them all, built by al-Mu’tasim but much modified and rebuilt by later Caliphs who continued to use it as their main residence and audience hall, was the Dar al-Khilafa or Jawsaq al-Khaqani, whose walls enclosed a total area of 175 hectares, 71 of which comprised gardens along the Tigris. A monumental flight of stairs 60m wide rose up the cliff from the coast of the Tigris to the Bab al-Amma which was the main reception area of the palace; beyond this was a courtyard 380m long with residential quarters all around it. The barracks beside it to the north would have accommodated an estimated 3000 of al-Mu’tasim’s guards, and even that is only allowing for one storey.
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