Al-Hirah | Iraq, City, & Pre-Islamic Arabs | Britannica (original) (raw)

al-Ḥīrah, (from Syriac ḥirtā, “camp”), ancient city located south of Kūfah in south-central Iraq; it was prominent in pre-Islamic Arab history. The town was originally a military encampment, but in the 5th and 6th centuries ce it was the capital of the Lakhmids, who were Arab vassals of Sasanian Persia (Iran). As such, it was a centre of diplomatic, political, and military activities involving Persia, the Byzantine Empire, and the Arabian Peninsula. It protected the Sasanians from the attacks of Arabian nomads and served as an important station on the caravan route between Persia and the Arabian Peninsula.

Al-Ḥīrah is most important, however, in the cultural history of the Arabs before the advent of Islam. The Lakhmids adorned the town with palaces and castles in its heyday during the 6th century. It was home to the ʿIbād, a community of Arabic-speaking Christians who had adopted the urban lifestyle of eastern Syrians and who significantly influenced the cultural production of pre-Islamic Arabic thought and literature. Tradition holds that the Arabic script was developed there, and some of the best-known poets in pre-Islamic Arabia (e.g., Ṭarafah and al-Nābighah al-Dhubyānī) gravitated toward the Lakhmid court.

As the seat of a bishopric for Nestorian Christians, al-Ḥīrah exercised a strong influence over the religious life of the East, and its monotheist Arab character prior to Muhammad’s preaching only added to the prestige of the city’s inhabitants after it was brought under Muslim rule in 633. The city had already begun to decline early in the 7th century, after the Sasanians brought about the collapse of the Lakhmid dynasty in 602, but the ʿIbād continued to play a prominent role in the production of knowledge and culture under the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258). One of the most well-known of the ʿIbād from this period was Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq al-ʿIbādī (Johannitius), a principal figure in the Graeco-Arabic translation movement that transferred Classical Greek knowledge into the Arabic language.

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Zeidan.