Baghdad

Baḡdāṯā (בגדתא) is the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic form of the name, attested in the Babylonian Talmud, where sages are identified by the toponym in passing legal discussions; the place it names was a modest settlement among the towns of Sasanian Babylonia, home to a Jewish community like dozens of others in the Talmud’s landscape. The form is the same Iranian name with the Aramaic determined ending, and the Talmud’s redaction was complete generations before al-Manṣūr’s surveyors arrived in 762, making these citations the name’s clearest pre-Islamic attestation.

The entry’s whole value lies in what the text does not know. The Talmud records Baḡdāṯā exactly as it records any minor river town, without emphasis, because in its day there was nothing to emphasize; that innocence is what makes it evidence, proof untouched by hindsight that the name predates the caliphate. There is also a quiet continuity beneath it: when the Abbasids built their capital, the academies of Sura and Pumbedita eventually moved there, and the geonim of Baghdad led the Jewish world from a city their own Talmud had already named. Most pre-histories on this atlas are recovered from royal inscriptions; Baghdad’s survives in a footnote of rabbinic law, the great city visible for a moment as the village it was.

Baghdād (بغداد) is not the name the caliph gave his capital but the name of the ground he built it on, a Sasanian-era village on the west bank of the Tigris whose name al-Manṣūr’s city inherited and made famous. The name is Iranian, generally explained from Old Iranian baga “god” and dāta “given,” a “god-given” of the same type as many Iranian personal and place names. The geographer Yāqūt, writing before the Mongol sack, opens his great gazetteer’s entry with the name’s variant spellings and the discomfort it caused: pious opinion disliked a pagan etymology attached to the seat of the caliphate, and some scholars are reported to have preferred the official name for exactly that reason.

The entry’s significance is the vernacular’s total victory. Against Baghdād stood everything the state could muster: an official name on the coins, the chancery, and the Friday sermon, and even a theological objection to the old word. None of it mattered. The village name took the metropolis within a generation, travelled with the merchants to appear as Báidá in the Song gazetteers, and never afterward yielded. It also carries a quiet historical correction, since the Talmudic Baḡdāṯā shows the name in use centuries before Islam: the most famous of all Islamic capitals bears a pre-Islamic, Persian, pagan name. Al-Manṣūr built the city; the name was already living there, and it simply moved into the new house.

Madīnat al-Salām (مدينة السلام), “the City of Peace,” is the official name al-Manṣūr gave his round city at its foundation in 762. The choice was a manifesto: it echoes the Qur’an’s dār al-salām, the “abode of peace” that is paradise, and cast the perfectly circular capital, with the caliph’s palace and mosque at its center, as a kind of paradise realized in brick on the Tigris. The name was no dead letter; it held the official registers for centuries, and Abbasid dirhams and dinars name their mint as Madīnat al-Salām down through the dynasty’s history, so that for five hundred years the silver in every purse contradicted the name in every mouth.

The entry preserves one half of the atlas’s cleanest natural experiment in naming. From 762 the same walls bore two names, an official one backed by the caliph, the coinage, and scripture itself, and a village name backed by nothing but habit. The official name never displaced the other even in Baghdad’s own streets, and when the histories came to be written, the historians wrote Baghdād. Constantinople ran the same experiment with the opposite result, the founder’s name holding for a thousand years; the difference, perhaps, is that Constantine renamed a city while al-Manṣūr tried to rename ground. On the coins it was always the City of Peace; in every mouth it was Baghdad, and the mouths outlasted the mint.

Baγdād is the Middle Persian form of the city’s name, and its attestation is the last entry of the Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr: the Pahlavi catalogue of the cities of the empire ends by recording that the šahrestān of Baghdad was built by Abū Jaʿfar, the caliph al-Manṣūr, who founded the Abbasid capital in 762 CE. The name itself is Iranian and older than the caliphal city, a compound of bag, “god,” and dād, “given,” borne by the village on the Tigris that the new foundation absorbed; the Jewish Aramaic form recorded on this page attests the settlement centuries before the caliphs. The attestation is Book Pahlavi, which has no Unicode encoding, so the entry carries transliteration only.

No other entry in this atlas documents quite so exact a changing of the guard. A Middle Persian text, in the script and language of the fallen Sasanian empire, closes its register of cities by logging the construction of the capital that replaced Ctesiphon and sealed that empire’s end; the dying tradition wrote its successor’s birth certificate. And the name it wrote was its own: the caliphs built the City of Peace, Madīnat al-Salām, as the official style, but what the world adopted was the old Persian village name, “given by God,” with bag the old Iranian word for a god. The Islamic world’s greatest city bears, to this day, a name in the language of the empire it superseded.

The Hebrew Bāvel, Babylon, as medieval Jewry’s name for the world whose capital was Baghdad. When the ancient academies of Sura and Pumbedita moved into the new Abbasid metropolis in the ninth and tenth centuries, they carried their address with them: their heads remained the geonim of the yeshivot of Bāvel, the exilarch in Baghdad ruled the captivity of Bāvel, and the legal correspondence that bound the diaspora to Baghdad ran under Babylon’s name for centuries after the city of Nebuchadnezzar lay in mounds a day’s ride to the south. Benjamin of Tudela’s twelfth-century itinerary still moves through this doubled landscape, the living caliphal city and, nearby, the ruins his tradition knew from scripture.

The entry is the mirror of the page’s Middle Persian Baγdād, and the two make the neatest inversion in the atlas. The Pahlavi tradition recorded the new city under its own new name in a dying language; the Hebrew tradition refused the new name almost entirely and folded the city into the oldest address it had, so that the caliphs’ City of Peace appears in the responsa as Babylon, of all names, the exile’s name. For the scattered communities writing to the geonim, the point was precisely the continuity: questions had gone to Bāvel since the Talmud was made there, and Bāvel is where answers still came from, whatever the caliphs called the place. Rarely has a name so old been made to do such practical, current work: a postal address fifteen centuries deep.

Báidá (白達) is the Song Chinese name for Baghdad, recorded in Zhao Rukuo’s Zhufanzhi of about 1225, where it receives its own entry among the dependencies of the Dàshí realm as the residence of their supreme ruler. The characters, “white” and “reach,” are sound only, a transcription of the Arabic name gathered from the sea merchants of Quanzhou whose reports Zhao, as superintendent of maritime trade, collected; his notice describes the caliph’s city secondhand but names it accurately.

The entry joins the small Zhufanzhi shelf on this atlas, beside Wùsīlí for Egypt, Ègēntuó for Alexandria, Sījiālǐyě for Sicily, and Májiā for Mecca on this cluster’s pages: the Islamic world’s geography arriving in China by ship rather than by the old overland road. There is an unnoticed irony in the timing, for Zhao wrote within a generation of Baghdad’s destruction; the Zhufanzhi preserves the caliph’s capital at the far edge of the world’s knowledge just before the Mongols, coming from China’s own side of Asia, put an end to it. The name reached China westbound by sea a few decades ahead of the army that travelled the other way by land.

The medieval Latin name of Baghdad, Baldac, with the manuscript variants Baldach and Baldacum, taken from the Arabic Baghdād through the mouths of Italian merchants, whose vernacular made the city Baldacco. The form runs through the travel literature of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Odoric of Pordenone’s Relatio and the Latin versions of Marco Polo among them, the writers locating in Baldac the caliph, the schools, and the silk workshops of the Abbasid capital that the Mongols had taken in 1258.

The name’s real monument is not in any chronicle. The brocaded silk the city exported was called in medieval Latin baldakinus, “Baghdad cloth,” and because such cloth was hung on poles and carried over kings and relics, the fabric’s name slid onto the canopy itself: the baldacchino that stands over the high altar of St Peter’s is, philologically, a bolt of Baghdad silk. Of all the names on this page, Baldac had the strangest afterlife, outliving its own reference: Europe mostly forgot that its word for the canopy of honor was the name of the caliphs’ city, and the name of Baghdad has hovered, unrecognized, over the altars of Christendom ever since.