Granada

Iliberri is the ancient name of the town on Granada’s hill, attested on its coinage and in Pliny’s survey, which records it as a Latin-right municipality with the honorific Florentinum; the spelling wobbles across sources, Iliberri, Illiberis, Eliberri, as Latin tried to hold a foreign shape. The name is pre-Roman, and its usual explanation is one of the most suggestive in Iberia: it is commonly read as an old Basque-type phrase, ili berri, “new town,” the same elements that survive in the Pyrenean Elne, anciently Illiberis, and in modern Basque hiri berri. Around 305 the town hosted the Council of Elvira, the earliest church council whose canons survive, and its later name-form Elvira clung to the district into the Islamic period.

Two things earn the entry its place. First, the identification: that ancient Iliberri stood on the Albaicín hill of Granada itself, long contested against sites in the plain, is now the general view, supported by excavation, and it makes Granada’s page reach a millennium behind its Arabic name; the prose records the debate because the older literature still carries it. Second, the meaning: if the “new town” reading holds, then the last capital of al-Andalus stands on a site whose first recorded name already meant what every Naples and Novgorod on this atlas means. The city that ended Iberia’s Islamic centuries began, in another millennium and another language family entirely, as somebody’s Newtown.

Gharnāṭa (غرناطة) is the Arabic name of Granada, a name that steps into history in 1013, when the Zirid emirs abandoned declining Elvira and moved its people to the stronger hill-site that already bore this name as a village or quarter. Under the Naṣrids it named the last Islamic state of Iberia, and it received the fullest civic biography any Andalusi city ever got: Ibn al-Khaṭīb, vizier of the Alhambra, titled his great history of the city al-Iḥāṭa fī akhbār Gharnāṭa, “the complete account of the reports of Gharnāṭa.” The name’s own origin, though, is disputed in the classic manner: a Romance granata, “pomegranate,” which the city’s arms still advertise; an Arabic “hill of strangers”; or a pre-Roman survival, with no reading commanding assent.

The pomegranate deserves the second look, because it shows folk etymology winning a whole country. Whatever Gharnāṭa first meant, Romance speakers heard “pomegranate,” Castile took the city in 1492 with the fruit already on its banner, and Spanish granada means both the city and the pomegranate to this day, the false etymology made true by heraldry and habit. Against Fez’s pickaxe legends, which stayed stories, Granada’s fruit became fact: the misreading was adopted, painted, and planted until it was simply the truth. Names on this atlas usually carry their pasts; this one had a past assigned to it retroactively, and wears it in every Spanish dictionary.