The Birth Of Baghdad Was A Landmark For World Civilization

This is a beautiful piece about the importance of Baghdad for world civilization. 

The "round city" that was founded in 762 by the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur was a milestone in the history of urban design, and later it became the cultural center of the world.

As the piece says:

"The scale of this great urban project is one of the most distinctive aspects of the story of Baghdad. With a circumference of four miles, the massive brick walls rising up from the banks of the Tigris were the defining signature of Mansur’s Round City. According to 11th-century scholar Al Khatib al Baghdadi — whose History of Baghdad is a mine of information on the construction of the city — each course consisted of 162,000 bricks for the first third of the wall’s height, 150,000 for the second third and 140,000 for the final section, bonded together with bundles of reeds. The outer wall was 80ft high, crowned with battlements and flanked by bastions. A deep moat ringed the outer wall perimeter."

Thousands of architects and engineers, legal experts, surveyors and carpenters, blacksmiths, diggers and ordinary labourers were recruited from across the Abbasid empire to build the city.

The ninth-century essayist, polymath and polemicist al-Jahiz was astonished when he saw the city. 

“I have seen the great cities, including those noted for their durable construction. I have seen such cities in the districts of Syria, in Byzantine territory, and in other provinces, but I have never seen a city of greater height, more perfect circularity, more endowed with superior merits or possessing more spacious gates or more perfect defences than Al Zawra, that is to say the city of Abu Jafar al-Mansur," he said.