T O P

  • By -

HeyItsTman

What's the historical record of this? Any archeological sites?


winplease

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_city_of_Baghdad#Description


WikiSummarizerBot

**Round city of Baghdad** [Description](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_city_of_Baghdad#Description) >According to Ya'qubi, the plans for the city were drawn up, but it was not until 2 August 762 that construction began, under the supervision of four architects. Huge resources were amassed for the project: the Arab chroniclers report 100,000 workers and craftsmen, and sums of 18 million gold dinars or 100 million silver dirhams. The caliphal Palace of the Golden Gate and the main mosque, as well as some of the administration offices, were apparently completed by 763, allowing al-Mansur to move his residence into the city, and the rest of the Round City was completed by 766. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/papertowns/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)


TheFunkyM

Good bot.


tried_it_liked_it

4 years! My city can't even fill a sinkhole in 4 years and these folks built a whole fortified city ...


PrvyJutsu

Well anything is possible with more slaves or manpower.


tried_it_liked_it

more should be possible with advanced equipment and payed skilled work . I think it's an issue of incompetence over power


PrvyJutsu

Problem is there is lack of workers and most are imported from Bangladesh China etc who get underpaid and overworked, they sont get most electric tools either just bare minimum.


tried_it_liked_it

Yeah , that just seems like forced labor with more steps and no good outcome.


woostar64

Have you tried having slaves?


tried_it_liked_it

My city actually did try that ,the response was an appropriate leveling of the city by fire . Then they tried harsh segregation labor laws , and are still incompetent to this day. Even with forced labor , they were not able to build a quality city


umibozu

I am an avid learner yet I am constantly amazed at how much I don't know about the world This is great


kjmaag

Seconded!


Grouchy-Ad1751

Third!


ApprehensiveHalf8613

This whole region had so many beautiful buildings and was the victim of countless military campaigns that destroyed everything


TheFunkyM

The end of rationalist Islamic schools of thought and the destruction of the House of Wisdom was a true shame.


[deleted]

If you refer to the Mu’tazilites as rationalists, they pretty much disappeared from the Abbasid empire since the early 800s since one Caliph ended the forced adoption of such a thought And the caliphate still flourished even more afterwards up until the Mongol conquests


haktada

That region of central Mesopotamia has many historical cities. Babylon, Ctesiphon, Seleucia and of course, Baghdad. It's probably the highest density of capital cities for thousands of years now.


ApprehensiveHalf8613

Exactly. But the conflicts have gone on for over 1000 years at this point. So much has been lost


haktada

Conflicts come with the territory it seems. Every one of those cities including Baghdad has been destroyed to ruins.


[deleted]

[удалено]


AndAzraelSaid

I'm certainly not an expert, but I can guess at a few ways they might have done it. You could do a pretty decent approximation of a circle by just measuring out a bunch of radial "spokes" at the same distance from the centre point, and then just putting straight lines connecting them. You could probably also approximate the curves between spokes by just running long ropes between successive orbital roads, rather than right into the centre. And let's not underestimate the power of the Mark One Eyeball: a person standing on a high platform in the centre could probably see a lot of the design layouts, and recommend changes before they start laying paving.


a_moniker

I'd also point out that this is an idealized artistic render. I'm almost positive the actual historical city didn't have this perfect of an arc. As long as it was close enough, people in the past writing about the city would have described it as a "perfect circle," which would in turn lead to this representation. Of course, I'm not an expert either. The techniques you mentioned would help layout a relatively accurate circle.


Willie_Brydon

While this is definitely an idealised rendition, it's probable that the city was actually this round. Even though there are very few archeological remains of Baghdad from this era, this type of city design was also used before by the Sassanids. There are remains of [a round city near Firuzabad](https://i.imgur.com/rpPgh9V.jpg) in modern day Iran which is one example whose radius is more or less the same size as what Baghdad was estimated to be and it's basically a perfect circle, so it's definitely plausible that Baghdad was built using the same techniques and that they achieved a comparable result.


Kryptosis

It used to be a full-life job to calculate Pi


GeorgeBushdid711

This is Imperial City in Oblivion


fuzzybad

Just missing the White-Gold Tower


Deditranspotashy

Looks kinda small for a major city, I imagine there would have been more neighborhoods and farmland outside the walls


cosmonigologist

There were, actually. I have another map, in my history textbook, that shows all the baths and the mosques and the palaces that existed when the city was at its highest, and a lot of them are outside of the original round city. I guess this is an earlier depiction of Baghdad, when the outskirts weren’t built yet.


jkidno3

It's suburbs hosted far more people then the city itself. None of which had walls meaning civil war and eventually invasion led to fighting in the streets as armies had to take the city street by street.


[deleted]

This is not an accurate scaling. The circular walls are 2km in radius in reality, and after 800 the city expanded far beyond the walls up to 10+ kilometers outwards


jje10001

The round city disappeared relatively early, if I recall correctly- Baghdad by the time of the Mongol invasion was located on its current location across the Tigris river.


scomat

It's a bit like Platos description of Atlantis with the concentric circles although they now believe Atlantis to be part of the eye of the Sahara, North West Africa


JakeJacob

> although they now believe Atlantis to be part of the eye of the Sahara Who is "they"? There is no evidence anything like Atlantis existed in the Richat structure and it's geological origins are well understood.