Local Historians and their Cities: the Urban Topography of al-Azdī’s Mosul and al-Sahmī’s Jurjan
Local Historians and their Cities: the Urban Topography of al-Azdī’s Mosul and al-Sahmī’s Jurjan
From the third/ninth century onwards, the writing of local histories in Arabic flourished across the Islamic world. A great number of these works dealt with the history of individual cities and this chapter examines how they depicted those cities. Did they tend to portray cities as topographical landscapes or as social communities? If the former, what aspects of urban topography were they most interested in? If the latter, were the communities presented as cohesive or diverse? This chapter addresses these questions by comparing two works: Abū Zakariyya’ al-Azdī’s (d. 334/946) history of Mosul and Ḥamza al-Sahmī’s (d. 427/1035-36) history of Jurjan. It seeks to demonstrate that local historians thought very carefully about how to invest cities and their topographies with socially relevant meanings.
Keywords: al-Azdī, Mosul, al-Sahmī, Jurjan, Arabic history-writing, local histories, topography, cities
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