Mecca

Makóraba (Μακόραβα) is a town of inland Arabia in Ptolemy’s Geographia, compiled around 150 CE, one of dozens of bare names with coordinates in his catalogue of the peninsula. Since the sixteenth century, European geographers have identified it with Mecca, and the identification hardened into fact in atlases and reference works; its supporters connected the name to Old South Arabian mkrb, read as “sanctuary,” which would make Ptolemy’s entry a pre-Islamic attestation of Mecca as a holy place. The identification, never actually argued so much as inherited, was systematically examined by Ian Morris in 2018 and found to rest on nothing: the coordinates fit poorly, the mkrb etymology is linguistically doubtful, and the resemblance between the names amounts to a shared m and k.

The entry is kept, labeled as disputed, because the dispute itself is the significant fact. If Makóraba is Mecca, the city has a name in the classical record five centuries before the Qur’an; if it is not, Mecca is unattested by any outside observer before Islam, an extraordinary silence for a supposedly ancient center of pilgrimage and trade, and one that historians of early Islam now weigh seriously. No other identification on this atlas carries such a load: a single line in an Alexandrian catalogue has had to bear, or fail to bear, the whole pre-Islamic history of a holy city. Five centuries of maps bet on the identification; the evidence, on inspection, was never there to bet with.

Makka (مكة) enters the durable written record in the Qur’an itself, which names the city once in this form, “in the valley of Makka,” and once in another: “the first House established for mankind is the one at Bakka.” The doublet is ancient and unresolved; the commentators offered every solution from a dialectal b/m alternation to a distinction between the sanctuary (Bakka) and the town around it (Makka), and no explanation has won. The name’s etymology is equally open. Proposals have reached from Arabic roots to the Old South Arabian mkrb, “sanctuary,” but the honest position, held by the standard references, is that the origin of Makka is unknown.

For the city at the center of a world religion, this is a remarkably undocumented name, and the entry’s significance is precisely that opacity. Elsewhere on the atlas the great sanctuaries carry transparent names, Jerusalem’s “foundation of peace,” Babylon’s “gate of the god”; Mecca’s name explains nothing and descends from nothing traceable, as if the city had no history before the revelation that made it the axis of prayer. Even its earliest secure attestations are scripture rather than stone: no inscription, no archive, only the recited text, which then preserved both variants of the name forever because the text could not be altered. A name of unknown meaning, fixed eternally in two spellings by the one book that could fix anything; the city that orients a faith cannot itself be traced past the faith’s first page.

Májiā (麻嘉) is the Song Chinese name for Mecca, recorded in Zhao Rukuo’s Zhufanzhi of about 1225 among the lands of the Dàshí. The characters transcribe the Arabic name as the sea merchants pronounced it, and the entry’s information is recognizably the hajj at one remove: Zhao reports that the peoples of the Dàshí lands journey there year after year from every quarter, and describes the great cubical shrine at the center of the city. What he cannot do is classify it, and so the Zhufanzhi presents the founder of the faith as a Buddha and the Kaaba as the house where he lived, Islam filed under the one category of foreign holiness that Song China possessed.

The entry is therefore a double transmission, and only half of it worked. The name crossed perfectly: Májiā is Makka, sound for sound, as exact as maritime hearsay could make it. The religion crossed as translation into the nearest available frame, pilgrimage read as Buddhist pilgrimage, prophet read as Buddha, sanctuary read as relic-house. On this atlas names regularly outtravel understanding, but rarely so visibly side by side in a single paragraph of one gazetteer. The sounds of a name survive any journey intact; what the name means has to be rebuilt at every border from local materials, and in Quanzhou the local material was Buddhism.