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112-594: As a generic term in Arabic , sawād ( سواد ) was used to denote the irrigated and cultivated areas in any district. Unmodified, it always referred to southern Iraq, the sawād of Baghdad . It replaced the earlier and more narrow term Rādhān . The term sawad eventually came to refer to the rural district around a particular city; thus, contemporary geographers made references to the Sawad of Baghdad , of Basra , of Kufa , of Wasit , of Samarra , or of Anbar . This usage

224-575: A collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic, first emerged during the Iron Age . Previously, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic script at Qaryat al-Faw , in southern present-day Saudi Arabia. However, this inscription does not participate in several of the key innovations of the Arabic language group, such as

336-435: A corpus of poetic texts, in addition to Qur'an usage and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the ʿarabiyya . Arabic spread with the spread of Islam . Following the early Muslim conquests , Arabic gained vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish . In the early Abbasid period , many Classical Greek terms entered Arabic through translations carried out at Baghdad's House of Wisdom . By

448-434: A detailed book on agronomy called Kitab al-filaha al-Nabatiyya , or The Nabataean Agriculture , which documents many of the agricultural practices of the Sawad in the 3rd century AH. The techniques used by farmers in the medieval Sawad were mostly the same as those used by twentieth-century Iraqi farmers. Buzjani and Ibn Wahshiyya both wrote extensively on such practices. Several different ploughs were in use, including

560-1081: A dialect of Arabic and written in the Latin alphabet . The Balkan languages, including Albanian, Greek , Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian , have also acquired many words of Arabic origin, mainly through direct contact with Ottoman Turkish . Arabic has influenced languages across the globe throughout its history, especially languages where Islam is the predominant religion and in countries that were conquered by Muslims. The most markedly influenced languages are Persian , Turkish , Hindustani ( Hindi and Urdu ), Kashmiri , Kurdish , Bosnian , Kazakh , Bengali , Malay ( Indonesian and Malaysian ), Maldivian , Pashto , Punjabi , Albanian , Armenian , Azerbaijani , Sicilian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian, Tagalog , Sindhi , Odia , Hebrew and African languages such as Hausa , Amharic , Tigrinya , Somali , Tamazight , and Swahili . Conversely, Arabic has borrowed some words (mostly nouns) from other languages, including its sister-language Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin and to

672-431: A kind of alcoholic beverage was prepared from a mixture of barley and millet. According to Ibn Wahshiyya, six different kinds of wheat were grown in the Sawad. The most important wheat-growing areas were located around Kashkar and Anbar , although both districts experienced a steep decline in wheat production by the end of the 3rd century AH. Perhaps due to its greater resilience to the increasing soil salinity, barley

784-487: A lesser extent and more recently from Turkish, English, French, and Italian. Arabic is spoken by as many as 380 million speakers, both native and non-native, in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world, and the fourth most used language on the internet in terms of users. It also serves as the liturgical language of more than 2 billion Muslims . In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Arabic

896-615: A long period of decline in population and in cultivated area over the centuries until the Mongol conquest. The destruction accompanying the Mongol conquest was the dramatic final blow to the patterns of settlements in Iraq. From as early as the late fourth millennium BCE , southern Mesopotamia was home to an urban civilization built upon irrigation agriculture. This enabled the security, stability, population density, and complex social organization that characterized this urban setting. Warfare with

1008-690: A millennium before the modern period . Early lexicographers ( لُغَوِيُّون lughawiyyūn ) sought to explain words in the Quran that were unfamiliar or had a particular contextual meaning, and to identify words of non-Arabic origin that appear in the Quran. They gathered shawāhid ( شَوَاهِد 'instances of attested usage') from poetry and the speech of the Arabs—particularly the Bedouin ʾaʿrāb  [ ar ] ( أَعْراب ) who were perceived to speak

1120-425: A raised platform at the same height as the spillway. In front of the abutments were two guide banks: the one on the right, as with the abutment on that side, helped serve as a closing wall, and the one on the left ended in a tower. The closing walls served to prevent wave action from eroding the sides of the pool to a point where the water could spill around the weir on the other side. Finally, 140 meters upstream from

1232-443: A reputation as being food for poor people. Nonetheless, rice remained the single most important food for many people, especially the poor, in southern Iraq due to its low price. Described as a summer crop by Ibn Wahshiyya, sorghum ( dhura ) was grown in large quantities throughout Iraq. Bread made from sorghum flour, especially when mixed with wheat and barley flour, was regarded more highly by Southern Iraqis than rice bread. Sorghum

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1344-594: A result, many European languages have borrowed words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages (mainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese , Catalan , and Sicilian ) owing to the proximity of Europe and the long-lasting Arabic cultural and linguistic presence, mainly in Southern Iberia, during the Al-Andalus era. Maltese is a Semitic language developed from

1456-462: A script derived from ASA attest to a language known as Hasaitic . On the northwestern frontier of Arabia, various languages known to scholars as Thamudic B , Thamudic D, Safaitic , and Hismaic are attested. The last two share important isoglosses with later forms of Arabic, leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and Hismaic are early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic . Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic",

1568-470: A single language, despite mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions. From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages . This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for

1680-507: A type of Arabic. Cypriot Arabic is recognized as a minority language in Cyprus. The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia , which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. Tawleed is the process of giving a new shade of meaning to an old classical word. For example, al-hatif lexicographically means

1792-507: A variety of regional vernacular Arabic dialects , which are not necessarily mutually intelligible. Classical Arabic is the language found in the Quran , used from the period of Pre-Islamic Arabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate . Classical Arabic is prescriptive, according to the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians (such as Sibawayh ) and the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries (such as

1904-415: A well- cemented mixture of lime, pebbles, limestone cherts , and small pieces of brick, all built on top of a stepped brick platform. Two abutments were built in front of the spillway, one on each side, to contain the water even during a flood. The right abutment was built more solidly than the left, and it also served as a closing wall for the pool. It was buttressed with a tower at each end and built on

2016-476: A wider audience." In the wake of the industrial revolution and European hegemony and colonialism , pioneering Arabic presses, such as the Amiri Press established by Muhammad Ali (1819), dramatically changed the diffusion and consumption of Arabic literature and publications. Rifa'a al-Tahtawi proposed the establishment of Madrasat al-Alsun in 1836 and led a translation campaign that highlighted

2128-590: Is a minimum level of comprehension between all Arabic dialects, this level can increase or decrease based on geographic proximity: for example, Levantine and Gulf speakers understand each other much better than they do speakers from the Maghreb. The issue of diglossia between spoken and written language is a complicating factor: A single written form, differing sharply from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites several sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all speak

2240-559: Is a sister language rather than their direct ancestor. Arabia had a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. The term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula , as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece . In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside the Ancient South Arabian family (e.g. Southern Thamudic) were spoken. It

2352-473: Is about 5 inches. Frost may occur anywhere in Iraq during the winter, except for the southernmost parts, and they come in the wake of the depressions, after the rain. Snow sometimes lays on the ground for several days. According to Husam Qawam El-Samarraie , the climate of Iraq during the Abbasid era was probably similar to today, although the greater abundance of date palm orchards then "may have mitigated

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2464-478: Is believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages (non-Central Semitic languages) were spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hejaz , Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages. In Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested. In eastern Arabia, inscriptions in

2576-408: Is credited with establishing the rules of Arabic prosody . Al-Jahiz (776–868) proposed to Al-Akhfash al-Akbar an overhaul of the grammar of Arabic, but it would not come to pass for two centuries. The standardization of Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehensive description of the ʿarabiyya "Arabic", Sībawayhi's al - Kitāb , is based first of all upon

2688-472: Is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar , or an-naḥw ( النَّحو "the way" ), and pioneering a system of diacritics to differentiate consonants ( نقط الإعجام nuqaṭu‿l-i'jām "pointing for non-Arabs") and indicate vocalization ( التشكيل at-tashkīl ). Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (718–786) compiled the first Arabic dictionary, Kitāb al-'Ayn ( كتاب العين "The Book of the Letter ع "), and

2800-578: Is intensely hot and dry, with the sky mostly cloudless and rain extremely rare. The prevailing northwest wind (the Shamal ) is a hot wind and is strong during the day but dissipates at night. Winter lasts from November until April, and the northwest winds are weaker and often interrupted by depressions coming from the Mediterranean . The southeast winds (called Sharqi ) are accompanied by cold temperatures, cloudy skies, and rain. Average winter rainfall

2912-574: Is not present in the spoken varieties, but deletes Classical words that sound obsolete in MSA. In addition, MSA has borrowed or coined many terms for concepts that did not exist in Quranic times, and MSA continues to evolve. Some words have been borrowed from other languages—notice that transliteration mainly indicates spelling and not real pronunciation (e.g., فِلْم film 'film' or ديمقراطية dīmuqrāṭiyyah 'democracy'). The current preference

3024-855: Is official in Mali and recognized as a minority language in Morocco, while the Senegalese government adopted the Latin script to write it. Maltese is official in (predominantly Catholic ) Malta and written with the Latin script . Linguists agree that it is a variety of spoken Arabic, descended from Siculo-Arabic , though it has experienced extensive changes as a result of sustained and intensive contact with Italo-Romance varieties, and more recently also with English. Due to "a mix of social, cultural, historical, political, and indeed linguistic factors", many Maltese people today consider their language Semitic but not

3136-569: Is prone to flooding, since winter and spring storms in the Zagros mountains lead to highly destructive floods. The most destructive flood on the Tigris in modern times was in 1954, when there was a flow of 16,000 cumecs , whereas the worst flood on the Euphrates was in 1929 with only 5,200 cumecs. The Euphrates was therefore more manageable, while settlements along the Tigris had to be built away from

3248-411: Is sometimes used as an acronym for full unit name, with the plural form cumecs also common in speech. It is commonly used between workers in the measurement of water flow through natural streams and civil works, but rarely used in writing. Data in units of m  ⋅ s are used along the y-axis or vertical axis of a flow hydrograph , which describes the time variation of discharge of

3360-572: Is the third most widespread official language after English and French, one of six official languages of the United Nations , and the liturgical language of Islam . Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities around the world and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, governments and the media. During the Middle Ages , Arabic was a major vehicle of culture and learning, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As

3472-477: Is the unit of volumetric flow rate in the International System of Units (SI). It corresponds to the exchange or movement of the volume of a cube with sides of one metre (39.37 in) in length (a cubic meter , originally a stere ) each second . It is popularly used for water flow, especially in rivers and streams , and fractions for HVAC values measuring air flow. The term cumec

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3584-590: Is the variety used in most current, printed Arabic publications, spoken by some of the Arabic media across North Africa and the Middle East, and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. "Literary Arabic" and "Standard Arabic" ( فُصْحَى fuṣḥá ) are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic. Some of the differences between Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are as follows: MSA uses much Classical vocabulary (e.g., dhahaba 'to go') that

3696-413: Is to avoid direct borrowings, preferring to either use loan translations (e.g., فرع farʻ 'branch', also used for the branch of a company or organization; جناح janāḥ 'wing', is also used for the wing of an airplane, building, air force, etc.), or to coin new words using forms within existing roots ( استماتة istimātah ' apoptosis ', using the root موت m/w/t 'death' put into

3808-524: Is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the industrial and post-industrial era , especially in modern times. Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, which is construed as a multitude of dialects of this language. These dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are usually acquired in families, while

3920-445: The Lisān al-ʻArab ). Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties and has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary

4032-702: The Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world . The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic , including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic , which is derived from Classical Arabic . This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā ( اَلعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ "the eloquent Arabic") or simply al-fuṣḥā ( اَلْفُصْحَىٰ ). Arabic

4144-500: The Bata'ih and Basra regions. Rice was often served with fish and/or vegetables. Various recipes called for rice to be cooked with milk , butter , oil , or fat , and seasoned with salt . Rice-based pastries were also eaten, and a type of rice wine called nabīdh was produced in many districts, including Abdasi , Badaraya , Bakusaya , and Junhula . Rice bread, like barley, was cheaper than wheat bread, which resulted in it gaining

4256-799: The Roman Empire sometimes threatened the security of the region, particularly the areas to the west of the Tigris . There was widespread destruction of major urban centers as well as rural agricultural infrastructure that was necessary for recovery. For example, even the area of the Nahr al-Malik, deep within Sassanid territory, was devastated by the Roman emperor Julian 's invasion of Mesopotamia. The Persians destroyed dikes, which caused extensive flooding, while simultaneously damming up major waterways to prevent

4368-533: The Sarsar canal. Finally, the bakra was a simple animal-powered device used to transport water taken from wells. The government ministry responsible for the construction and maintenance of irrigation projects was the Diwan al-Kharaj , which was based in the capital and had branches in the provinces. It employed land surveyors and civil engineers for both construction of new projects and their maintenance. Maintaining

4480-568: The Xth form , or جامعة jāmiʻah 'university', based on جمع jamaʻa 'to gather, unite'; جمهورية jumhūriyyah 'republic', based on جمهور jumhūr 'multitude'). An earlier tendency was to redefine an older word although this has fallen into disuse (e.g., هاتف hātif 'telephone' < 'invisible caller (in Sufism)'; جريدة jarīdah 'newspaper' < 'palm-leaf stalk'). Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to

4592-405: The dūlāb , was another type of waterwheel; it was powered by animals (typically horses or oxen , although in the area of Anbar they were powered by camels ) instead of water thrust. These were commonly used around Baghdad and Anbar. The third was the daliya ; it was a waterwheel powered by human labor. The fourth, the shādūf , was a bucket operated by four people; it was in use in the area of

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4704-494: The northern Hejaz . These features are evidence of common descent from a hypothetical ancestor , Proto-Arabic . The following features of Proto-Arabic can be reconstructed with confidence: On the other hand, several Arabic varieties are closer to other Semitic languages and maintain features not found in Classical Arabic, indicating that these varieties cannot have developed from Classical Arabic. Thus, Arabic vernaculars do not descend from Classical Arabic: Classical Arabic

4816-431: The sikkah , or iron coulter . An instrument called the mijrad was used to level a field after it had been ploughed. Grafting was practiced extensively: most fruit trees were grown this way rather than from seeds. Ibn Wahshiyya wrote a detailed description of the practice. Layering was done with vines if there was enough space for it. Ibn Wahshiyya described two general types of manure used to fertilize crops in

4928-419: The "learned" tradition (Classical Arabic). This variety and both its classicizing and "lay" iterations have been termed Middle Arabic in the past, but they are thought to continue an Old Higazi register. It is clear that the orthography of the Quran was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic; rather, it shows the attempt on the part of writers to record an archaic form of Old Higazi. In

5040-886: The "purest," most eloquent form of Arabic—initiating a process of jamʿu‿l-luɣah ( جمع اللغة 'compiling the language') which took place over the 8th and early 9th centuries. Kitāb al-'Ayn ( c.  8th century ), attributed to Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi , is considered the first lexicon to include all Arabic roots ; it sought to exhaust all possible root permutations —later called taqālīb ( تقاليب ) — calling those that are actually used mustaʿmal ( مستعمَل ) and those that are not used muhmal ( مُهمَل ). Lisān al-ʿArab (1290) by Ibn Manzur gives 9,273 roots, while Tāj al-ʿArūs (1774) by Murtada az-Zabidi gives 11,978 roots. Cumec Cubic metre per second or cubic meter per second in American English (symbol m  ⋅ s or m /s )

5152-454: The 11th and 12th centuries in al-Andalus , the zajal and muwashah poetry forms developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb. The Nahda was a cultural and especially literary renaissance of the 19th century in which writers sought "to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression." According to James L. Gelvin , " Nahda writers attempted to simplify the Arabic language and script so that it might be accessible to

5264-571: The 4th to the 6th centuries, the Nabataean script evolved into the Arabic script recognizable from the early Islamic era. There are inscriptions in an undotted, 17-letter Arabic script dating to the 6th century CE, found at four locations in Syria ( Zabad , Jebel Usays , Harran , Umm el-Jimal ). The oldest surviving papyrus in Arabic dates to 643 CE, and it uses dots to produce the modern 28-letter Arabic alphabet. The language of that papyrus and of

5376-834: The 8th century, knowledge of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world, both for Muslims and non-Muslims. For example, Maimonides , the Andalusi Jewish philosopher, authored works in Judeo-Arabic —Arabic written in Hebrew script . Ibn Jinni of Mosul , a pioneer in phonology , wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as Kitāb Al-Munṣif , Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab , and Kitāb Al-Khaṣāʾiṣ    [ ar ] . Ibn Mada' of Cordoba (1116–1196) realized

5488-564: The Abbasid-era ash-Shadhirwan al-Asfal weir in 1957–58, which al-Khatib al-Baghdadi mentioned as serving the Nahrawan canal and which serves as a model for our understanding of how weirs were built during that period. It served to raise the water level in front of it (i.e. upstream) to a height 3 meters above the area downstream, and it supplied 11 branch canals. It consisted of a spillway , 37.56 meters wide and 30 meters deep, and made of

5600-412: The Middle East and North Africa have become a badge of sophistication and modernity and ... feigning, or asserting, weakness or lack of facility in Arabic is sometimes paraded as a sign of status, class, and perversely, even education through a mélange of code-switching practises." Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementary and secondary schools, especially Muslim schools. Universities around

5712-627: The Parthian era. This indicates that the growing population in large cities consisted of people who originally had come from the medium-sized towns, rather than rural population moving to large urban centers. Under the Sassanids, the area in cultivation in the Diyala basin reached an extent that had never been attained before, and never would be again. During this time, almost 8,000 square kilometers were brought into cultivation, almost totally covering

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5824-690: The Qur'an is referred to by linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into " Classical Arabic ". In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in the Hejaz , which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra , most strongly in Judeo-Christian texts, keeping alive ancient features eliminated from

5936-576: The Romance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb , a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq , much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers but relatively easily learned by them. This suggests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be considered separate languages. With

6048-491: The Romans from being able to use them for transport. The Romans, meanwhile, burned small towns and villages in the countryside while also destroying farms and killing livestock. Since the destruction largely occurred west of the Tigris, the Sassanid emperors focused on developing the region of Ctesiphon and its hinterlands east of the Tigris, while investing less in the regions on the west bank. Thus, settlement retracted west of

6160-516: The Sasanian period, led to a mushrooming population and the rise of many new cities. The vast, complex systems that emerged during the Sassanid period ultimately made local self-sufficiency impossible. Lack of maintenance on canals could have a strong adverse effect on faraway regions. This made state supervision of the infrastructure absolutely necessary to maintain this degree of settlement and cultivation. Settlement in Iraq reached its apex during

6272-626: The Sawad had to be elevated slightly above the ground. This came with significant risk: if there was a breach in the canal's banks, the water would flood surrounding fields. The most detailed account of Islamic canals is that of Suhrāb, or Ibn Serapion . A canal could become the center of urban activity: for example, Bilal ibn Burda lined both sides of his canal with shops and moved the local suq there. Fishing may have been done in some canals, with at least two canals being named after types of fish that lived in them. Canals could also be used to power mills or for fulling cloth. Construction of canals

6384-457: The Sawad was crisscrossed by many canals. In the Islamic period, most canals ran west to east, from the Euphrates to the Tigris , since water level in the Tigris was lower than that of the Euphrates. As Ya'qubi observed, the Tigris watered the area to the east of the river, whereas the area to the west of the Tigris was irrigated with waters from the Euphrates. Due to gravity, the canals of

6496-494: The Sawad. Basra, for instance, has 60 mm of rainfall per year. Without irrigation, agriculture here would fail. The amount of water used in irrigation was crucial: excessive irrigation would cause a dangerous rise in the water table , as well as enabling capillary action to bring saline water up to the surface. Too little irrigation, on the other hand, left no extra water to leach the salts that had been deposited from previous irrigation. Robert M. Adams suggested that, after

6608-452: The Sawad. The first was "natural" manure, which consisted of either dried plant matter, feces (both animal and human), or ash and cinders. Ibn Wahshiyya preferred this kind. The second kind was "composite" manure, which consisted of a mixture of several types of "natural" manure along with earth and water, and was left to decompose after mixing. Different crops called for different kinds of manure, and some needed no fertilization at all. Manure

6720-584: The Tigris from its peak during Parthian rule. In the Diyala valley east of the Tigris, however, settlement reached its peak, with over twice as many settlements and over twice the built-up area as during the Parthian period. In this region, human settlement was as much as 35 times denser and more extensive than it had been under the Achaemenid kings. During this period, both large cities and small villages increased in number and in size, while medium-sized towns decreased in percentage of all settlements compared to

6832-904: The Tigris. Suhrab lists four great lagoons ( Ḥawr ) in the Batihah: Bahassa, Bakhmasa, Basriyatha, and finally al-Muhammadiyah, which was the largest. Below the Hawr al-Muhammadiyah, the channel called the Nahr Abi'l-As'ad finally carried the waters of the Batihah to the head of the Dijlah al-`Awra', or "one-eyed Tigris". The hydrography of the Bata'ih was not static. Ibn Rustah described the Bata'ih as covered by reed beds crossed by water channels, where enormous amounts of fish where caught, then salted and exported to neighboring provinces. The water level

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6944-578: The Zagros mountains, and melting snows in the mountains lead to high water in April. The Euphrates, on the other hand, mostly consists of water from the Anatolian highlands, and melting snow reaches lower Mesopotamia later, in early May. This is too late to help with growing crops for the May and June harvest season. The timing of the flooding in the Euphrates was less helpful than the Tigris. The Tigris, however,

7056-451: The actual amount of land set aside for grains would have been twice that.) Wheat and barley were grown in every district of the Sawad. In most of these districts, the kharaj tax was paid mostly in the form of those two grains. Tabari described the four districts surrounding Baghdad as extremely productive, which is partly why the caliph al-Mansur chose Baghdad for the site of his new capital. Breads made from wheat and barley formed

7168-520: The agrarian economy diminished to the vanishing point." Contemporary sources report this as a time of administrative and economic collapse, with many villages destroyed, communications disrupted, robbery and brigandry were rampant, and cultivation was made practically impossible. By the early 10th century, 62% of settlements in the area around Baghdad had become abandoned. Yet at the same time, a movement of popular nostalgia emerged, "glorifying indigenous 'Nabataean' achievements, especially those connected with

7280-574: The conversion of Semitic mimation to nunation in the singular. It is best reassessed as a separate language on the Central Semitic dialect continuum. It was also thought that Old Arabic coexisted alongside—and then gradually displaced— epigraphic Ancient North Arabian (ANA), which was theorized to have been the regional tongue for many centuries. ANA, despite its name, was considered a very distinct language, and mutually unintelligible, from "Arabic". Scholars named its variant dialects after

7392-587: The emergence of Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include: There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern Arabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of

7504-728: The eve of the conquests: Northern and Central (Al-Jallad 2009). The modern dialects emerged from a new contact situation produced following the conquests. Instead of the emergence of a single or multiple koines, the dialects contain several sedimentary layers of borrowed and areal features, which they absorbed at different points in their linguistic histories. According to Veersteegh and Bickerton, colloquial Arabic dialects arose from pidginized Arabic formed from contact between Arabs and conquered peoples. Pidginization and subsequent creolization among Arabs and arabized peoples could explain relative morphological and phonological simplicity of vernacular Arabic compared to Classical and MSA. In around

7616-607: The fact that they participate in the innovations common to all forms of Arabic. The earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script are three lines of poetry by a man named Garm(')allāhe found in En Avdat, Israel , and dated to around 125 CE. This is followed by the Namara inscription , an epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From

7728-481: The floods of the early 7th century (before this, its course was the same as it is today). It passed the city of Wasit and entered the Batihah at the town of Qatr . According to Donald Hill , after about 1200, the Tigris and Euphrates started to gradually shift toward their present courses, which they finally reached during the 1500s. On the other hand, Stephen Hemsley Longrigg described the shift as taking place in

7840-476: The flow of the Tigris to supplement the Euphrates: during the winter growing season, when the Tigris was less prone to intense flooding, Tigris water was brought in, and then its headworks closed off and protected as much as possible, while now the greatly enlarged Euphrates was used to support irrigation efforts. This massive reshaping of the natural relationship between these rivers, which reached its peak during

7952-458: The fourth most useful language for business, after English, Mandarin Chinese , and French. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet , an abjad script that is written from right to left . Arabic is usually classified as a Central Semitic language . Linguists still differ as to the best classification of Semitic language sub-groups. The Semitic languages changed between Proto-Semitic and

8064-597: The inclusion of new words into their published standard dictionaries. They also publish old and historical Arabic manuscripts. In 1997, a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League . These academies and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences, creating terms in Arabic to describe new concepts, toward

8176-613: The language. Software and books with tapes are an important part of Arabic learning, as many of Arabic learners may live in places where there are no academic or Arabic language school classes available. Radio series of Arabic language classes are also provided from some radio stations. A number of websites on the Internet provide online classes for all levels as a means of distance education; most teach Modern Standard Arabic, but some teach regional varieties from numerous countries. The tradition of Arabic lexicography extended for about

8288-604: The late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koine" distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd , probably in connection with the court of al-Ḥīra . During the first Islamic century, the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing persons spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far later manuscripts, contain traces of non-standardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology and syntax. Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali ( c.  603 –689)

8400-453: The late Sasanian dynasty, the Iraqi countryside would have been under "virtually continuous cultivation", supporting a much larger population than in previous periods. During the time of the caliphs Harun al-Rashid and al-Ma'mun , the total winter acreage for cereal crops has been estimated at 3 million hectares in cultivation during a single winter. (Since land was fallowed every other year,

8512-433: The late Sasanian period, the irrigation system of the Sawad must have diverted virtually the entire flow of both the Tigris and Euphrates to agricultural purposes. Regarding the Euphrates, Robert M. Adams wrote that, "with a whole series of massive diversions upstream, it is not unlikely that in Sasanian times the Euphrates entered the swamps [at its lower end]... with very little if any residual flow." Throughout its history,

8624-530: The late Sassanid period. The tumult surrounding the Islamic conquest led to a sudden, steep decline. Fairly quickly, however, the Muslims were able to restore much of the Sassanid establishment. However, from the mid-800s onward, political instability in the Abbasid Caliphate led to a neglect of the rural economy and more corrupt exploitation of the peasantry in search of short-term profits. This led to

8736-420: The latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschool-aged children. The relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin vernaculars (which became Romance languages ) in medieval and early modern Europe. MSA

8848-543: The main food for most Iraqis, especially in major urban areas such as Baghdad, Wasit, Basra, and Kufa. An especially popular dish was al-tharīd , which consisted of pieces of bread with either vegetable soup or a combination of olive oil and vinegar . Dishes such as burghul , habbīya , and disheesh were made from boiled and peeled wheat. Other dishes consisted of a paste made from mashed meat and pearl wheat. Most Iraqi peasants ate more barley-based breads, which were often made with millet and beans mixed in. Additionally,

8960-883: The many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language. Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants; geographically distant varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible , and some linguists consider them distinct languages. However, research indicates a high degree of mutual intelligibility between closely related Arabic variants for native speakers listening to words, sentences, and texts; and between more distantly related dialects in interactional situations. The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and talk shows , as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media such as poetry and printed advertising. Hassaniya Arabic , Maltese , and Cypriot Arabic are only varieties of modern Arabic to have acquired official recognition. Hassaniya

9072-427: The mid-9th century and Ali ibn Isa in 915: in many formerly prosperous districts, a drop by 90% or more took place "in this period of less than a single human life span." In the intervening years, there had been several decades of rural unrest and conflict, provoked by years of increasing tax burdens and abuses by state officials, as well as outright looting by Turkish mercenaries. The single greatest precipitating event

9184-782: The need for a lexical injection in Arabic, to suit concepts of the industrial and post-industrial age (such as sayyārah سَيَّارَة 'automobile' or bākhirah باخِرة 'steamship'). In response, a number of Arabic academies modeled after the Académie française were established with the aim of developing standardized additions to the Arabic lexicon to suit these transformations, first in Damascus (1919), then in Cairo (1932), Baghdad (1948), Rabat (1960), Amman (1977), Khartum  [ ar ] (1993), and Tunis (1993). They review language development, monitor new words and approve

9296-424: The one whose sound is heard but whose person remains unseen. Now the term al-hatif is used for a telephone. Therefore, the process of tawleed can express the needs of modern civilization in a manner that would appear to be originally Arabic. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic as well as their native dialects, which depending on

9408-475: The opening of the Katul al-Kisrawi made water readily available to farmers in the lower Nahrawan region, over-irrigation caused the water table to rise dramatically. Today, much of this region's soil is too saline for irrigated agriculture, and the area is largely abandoned. A similar phenomenon occurred in the Sawad of Basra . Insufficient gradient in local irrigation systems resulted in poor drainage of salts from

9520-549: The overhaul of Arabic grammar first proposed by Al-Jahiz 200 years prior. The Maghrebi lexicographer Ibn Manzur compiled Lisān al-ʿArab ( لسان العرب , "Tongue of Arabs"), a major reference dictionary of Arabic, in 1290. Charles Ferguson 's koine theory claims that the modern Arabic dialects collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests; this view has been challenged in recent times. Ahmad al-Jallad proposes that there were at least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on

9632-453: The period between 1500 and 1650. In Sasanian times, the Euphrates likely entered the swamps close to the site of the modern town of Shinafiya . The Batihah (plural: Bata'ih ) or great swamp was the medieval name for the vast marshlands of southern Iraq, along the lower courses of the Tigris and Euphrates. In the northwest, it stretched almost up to Kufa and Nippur , while in the northeast it began at al-Qatr , downstream from Wasit on

9744-424: The reconstruction of dykes and was able to reclaim part of the flooded land. Under Khusraw II , however, the Tigris continued to rise even higher. He spent huge sums of money to finance the restoration of the systems, but in vain. In the final years of the Sasanian empire, these projects were abandoned due to war, and local dihqans couldn't finance such major undertakings. Archaeological evidence indicates that there

9856-410: The region may be mutually unintelligible. Some of these dialects can be considered to constitute separate languages which may have "sub-dialects" of their own. When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within

9968-449: The region with farmland. A two-field crop rotation system was likely employed during this period, just as it was in Islamic times. The Bata'ih first formed during the Sasanian era. According to al-Baladhuri , during the reign of Kubadh (r. 488–531), the Tigris overflowed its banks and flooded large areas of productive farmland. Kubadh was unable to do anything about it, but after his son Khusraw I Anushirvan succeeded him, he ordered

10080-459: The region, leading to widespread emigration. The repercussions were felt heavily in Baghdad, since there was a desperate lack of grain leading to starvation. The lands of the Sawad were among the most fertile in the Islamic world, but this productivity was almost totally dependent on artificial irrigation: dry farming requires 200 mm of rainfall per year, an amount reached in almost nowhere in

10192-463: The richest rice-producing areas in the Sawad, which enticed government officials to compete for the control of the region. Ibn Wahshiyya wrote a detailed description of the cultivation of rice in the Sawad. There were two growing seasons for rice in the Sawad: a summer season, which was entirely dependent on irrigation, and a winter season, which was supported by rainfall. Summer rice was planted during

10304-427: The river to avoid being destroyed by flooding. Additionally, the Tigris's banks were so deep that canals had to be extended far down the backslope of the protective levees built along the river in order to keep a high enough water level. Yet these labor-intensive canal offtakes were directly exposed to the floods and could be suddenly buried under a deep layer of silt. Later on, however, a vast canal system came to use

10416-458: The same sentence. The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, in the same way it is for the varieties of Chinese , Hindi and Urdu , Serbian and Croatian , Scots and English, etc. In contrast to speakers of Hindi and Urdu who claim they cannot understand each other even when they can, speakers of the varieties of Arabic will claim they can all understand each other even when they cannot. While there

10528-474: The second half of July ( Tammuz ) and harvested in December ( Kanun al-Awwal ). Winter rice, meanwhile, was planted at the beginning of January ( Kanun al-Akhir ) and harvested in May ( Ayyar and June ( Haziran ). Rice farming required meticulous preparation, fertilization, irrigation, and labor for harvesting and threshing. Rice, and particularly rice bread, was a dietary staple in southern Iraq, especially in

10640-540: The sluice needed to be partially or fully closed. Buzjani outlined five main mechanical devices used for irrigation purposes in the Sawad. The first, the nā'ūr , was a waterwheel powered by the flow of the stream itself. They were used extensively in the area of the Nahrawan Canal , in the region of Anbar on the Euphrates , and in the western part of the Baduraya district, west of Baghdad . The second,

10752-521: The soil. To counter this, laborers, including the Zanj, were tasked with removing the salty topsoil and piling it up by the sides of the canals. As many as 45 million tons of soil were moved in this manner, but even this was insufficient. After Basra itself was sacked by the Zanj and then again by the Qarmatians, much of the fields were abandoned and never brought into cultivation again. At its apex under

10864-458: The sole example of Medieval linguist Abu Hayyan al-Gharnati – who, while a scholar of the Arabic language, was not ethnically Arab – Medieval scholars of the Arabic language made no efforts at studying comparative linguistics, considering all other languages inferior. In modern times, the educated upper classes in the Arab world have taken a nearly opposite view. Yasir Suleiman wrote in 2011 that "studying and knowing English or French in most of

10976-418: The spillway, there were two regulators , designed to relieve the weir during floods. The regulators were made of brick and date from the 9th century, although the arch on the right bank appears older and was probably built by the 8th century at the latest. Both regulators have vertical lines of holes, which were designed so that wooden beams could be inserted into them to hold the structures' planks in place when

11088-401: The spread of civilization and the improvement of agriculture. Even as actual conditions were deteriorating intolerably, exhaustively detailed compendiums were appearing with elaborate botanical nomenclature and careful specifications of all the procedures and requirements of good husbandry." The intentional breaching of the Nahrawan canal by Ibn Ra'iq in 937 led to a severe water shortage in

11200-563: The standardization of these new terms throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and toward the development of Arabic as a world language . This gave rise to what Western scholars call Modern Standard Arabic. From the 1950s, Arabization became a postcolonial nationalist policy in countries such as Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Sudan. Arabic usually refers to Standard Arabic, which Western linguists divide into Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. It could also refer to any of

11312-501: The towns where the inscriptions were discovered (Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Hismaic, Safaitic). However, most arguments for a single ANA language or language family were based on the shape of the definite article, a prefixed h-. It has been argued that the h- is an archaism and not a shared innovation, and thus unsuitable for language classification, rendering the hypothesis of an ANA language family untenable. Safaitic and Hismaic, previously considered ANA, should be considered Old Arabic due to

11424-485: The vast irrigation systems of Iraq required a large number of workers. In addition to the surveyors and engineers mentioned above, there were also qaīyāsun , who supervised water levels, flow, and capacity of rivers and canals; naqqālūn , who disposed of unneeded waste; razzāmūn , who bound reeds for use in building dams; haffārūn , who dredged canals; and workers (no name given) who carried loads of soil to reinforce structures such as dams and weirs. Ibn Wahshiyya wrote

11536-403: The violence of the winter winds and prevented the occurrence of the sandstorms that now sweep all over the country." The main crop-growing season in this region comes during the winter, and irrigation is needed at least monthly. However, neither the Tigris nor the Euphrates reaches its high water mark during the winter when farmers need water the most: the Tigris is fed by several tributaries in

11648-451: The world have classes that teach Arabic as part of their foreign languages , Middle Eastern studies , and religious studies courses. Arabic language schools exist to assist students to learn Arabic outside the academic world. There are many Arabic language schools in the Arab world and other Muslim countries. Because the Quran is written in Arabic and all Islamic terms are in Arabic, millions of Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab) study

11760-417: Was "a precipitate retreat from a vast central area of the Sawad" during this period, only reversing itself in modern times. After the golden age of the Abbasid Caliphate during the reign of Harun al-Rashid from 786 to 809, imperial revenues from the Sawad plummeted from 100 million dirhams to only 20 million by the early 10th century. The sharpest decline took place between the records of Ibn Khurdadhbeh in

11872-604: Was a more common crop than wheat in the medieval Sawad. Ibn Hawqal notes the region surrounding Wasit in particular as an important barley producer. Rice was grown in the parts of the Sawad that were warm and humid – two conditions necessary for it to thrive. Qudama noted that four districts paid taxes in barley and rice instead of the usual barley and wheat, indicating that rice was a particularly widespread crop there. These districts were Sura and Barbisama, Furat Badaqla, Nistar, and Kashkar . The rice plantations around Jamida , as described by Qadi Tanukhi , constituted some of

11984-423: Was also grown for use as fodder ; Ibn Wahshiyya considered it the ideal fodder for livestock, especially cows and goats . Arabic Arabic (endonym: اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ , romanized :  al-ʿarabiyyah , pronounced [al ʕaraˈbijːa] , or عَرَبِيّ , ʿarabīy , pronounced [ˈʕarabiː] or [ʕaraˈbij] ) is a Central Semitic language of

12096-405: Was exclusive to Iraq. The enormous economic potential of the Sawad is reflected in early Abbasid revenue lists: the Sawad produced four times as much tax revenue as the second-highest-producing province, Egypt , and five times as much as Syria and Palestine combined. During the medieval period, the lower Tigris followed a different course than it does today. It had shifted further west due to

12208-550: Was the Abbasid civil war and siege of Baghdad in 865, which "wiped out any notion that the government's reciprocal function of protection could be honoured". The Zanj rebellion lasted for 15 years before finally being quelled in 883, and the Qaramita movement that followed it was even larger and longer-lasting, leading to the area under state control shrinking dramatically and "prospects for any constructive, long-term approach to

12320-447: Was too shallow for most river boats to pass through, and only special pole-propelled vessels called mashhuf could be used for transport. Most of the marshes were covered by water, but there were some areas with good soil, where people formed settlements, grew crops, and dug canals for irrigation. In Iraq, there are two very distinct seasons: summer and winter. Spring and autumn are very short. Summer, which lasts from May through October,

12432-403: Was traded and sold locally, according to several sources, including Ibn Wahshiyya, Ibn Bassam , and Yaqut al-Hamawi . The Abbasid government played a role in supervising cultivation. It would sometimes loan money to farmers to help them buy seed and livestock. Some poorer farmers were directly given seeds. The government expected repayment in full after the harvest. At the maximum extent under

12544-429: Was very expensive. It was often financed by private investors who expected to turn a profit out of the deal. Usually, all the governor did was provide land for irrigation projects. The 3rd-century AH author al-Khatib al-Baghdadi listed some 30 weirs in Iraq, although most of them were no longer extant or operational at the time he wrote. The most extensive archaeological work done on one of those weirs has been done on

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