, a mediaeval Islamic town of upper al-D̲j̲azīra, classical Samosata, Ottoman Samsāṭ, modern Turkish Samsat in the il or province of Achyaman (lat. 37° 30′ N., long. 38° 32′ E.). Not to be confused with S̲h̲ims̲h̲āṭ [ q.v.] (Arsamosata) further up the river to the north-east, it lies on the right bank of the Euphrates’ northwards bend at an important crossing of the north-south route to Edessa or Urfa, 50 km/30 miles to the south of Sumaysāṭ, and the east-west one from Mārdīn. It may have had a bridge over the river in Antiquity, a…

b. ṣalāḥ al-dīn , in full al-malik al-afḍal abu ’l-ḥasan ʿalī nūr al-dīn , the eldest son of Saladin (Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, [ q.v.]), b. 565/1169-70, d. at Sumaysāṭ 622/1225. On Saladin’s death he was recognized as ruler of Damascus and head of the Ayyūbid family, but owing to his incapacity and self-indulgence he lost successively Damascus, Egypt, and all his Syrian fiefs, and ended as a dependent of the Sald̲j̲ūḳ sultan of Rūm. See ayyūbids . (H.A.R. Gibb) Bibliography Ibn Ḵh̲allikān, no. 459 Abū S̲h̲āma, Ḏh̲ayl al-Rawḍatayn, 145 Ibn Tag̲h̲rībīrdī, Nud̲j̲ūm, vi, index Maḳrīzī, Sulūk, i, index.

, the name of a small, right-bank affluent (Grk. Singas, Modern Tkish. Keysun Çayı, a tributary of the Gök Su) of the upper Euphrates and of a small town on it, both coming in mediaeval Islamic times within the northern part of Diyār Muḍar [ q.v.]. The Sand̲j̲a river runs into the Euphrates between Sumaysāṭ and Ḳalʿat al-Rūm [ q.vv.]. It was famed for its bridge, said by the Arabic geographers to have been composed of a single arch of 200 paces’ length constructed from dressed stone, and to have been one of the wonders of the world (cf. Yāḳūt, Buldān , iii, 264-5). It was …

, a mediaeval Islamic town in eastern Anatolia/western Armenia. It lay, at a site whose definite location is unknown, on the left bank of the southern headwater of the upper Euphrates, the classical Arsanias, modern Murad Su. Its location was, according to Yāḳūt, Buldān , ed. Beirut, iii, 362-3, between Bālūya (modern Palu) and Hiṣn Ziyād or K̲h̲artpirt [ q.v.] (modern Harput), and it is not to be confused with Sumaysāṭ [ q.v.] on the Euphrates further south. It was in the borderland between the Arabs and the Greeks, and possession of it must have oscillated between…

, Abu ’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. al-Muṭahhar al-ʿAdawī, Arab philologist, minor poet and anthologist. As poetic occurrences of his nisba and the town to which it refers show (Yāḳūt, Buldān, Beirut 1376/1957, iii, 363a, 1. 4; and Irs̲h̲ād , Cairo n.d., xvii, 241, 1. 5), the name-form “al-Sumaysāṭī, given in Flügel’s ed. of the Fihrist and, as an option, by Brockelmann, GAL S I, 251, should be discarded. Sumaysāṭ and S̲h̲ims̲h̲āṭ refer to two different places (Yāḳūt, Buldān, s.w., and cf. Le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate , 116-17 (S̲h̲ims̲h̲āṭ), 108 (…

, a town of northern Syria, situated to the north of Aleppo between the two rivers ʿAfrīn and Ḳuwayḳ, north of Aʿzāz and on the road from Aleppo to ʿAyntāb. It was apparently known to the Assyrians, since a letter in cuneiform script (Harper, no. 1037, Brit. Mus. K 13073, obv. 3) mentions a town Ki-li-zi. In Roman times, Killiz was called Ciliza sive Urmagiganti ( Itin. Ant. , ed. Pinder-Parthey, 84). In the mediaeval period it seems to have been of no importance. It is mentioned by Ps. Denys of Tell-Mahré at the time of the revolt against …

b. Muḥammad, an important ¶ court official of two Sald̲j̲ūḳ sultans of Rūm, Kayḳubād I and Kayk̲h̲usraw II. Köpek’s place and date of birth are unknown. He is first mentioned as a tard̲j̲umān (Ibn Bībī, 146). Late in Kayḳubād’s reign, Köpek had risen to become amīr-i s̲h̲ikār (master of the hunt) and miʿmār (minister of works), entrusted with overseeing the construction of Kayḳubād’s new palace at Ḳubādābād [ q.v.] ( ibid., 147). Köpek himself erected in 633/1235 a large caravanserai, known as the Zazadin or Sadeddin Han, between Konya and Aksaray. Two extant insc…

, Sebasṭiyya , the Arabic name of various towns in the Near East. 1. The ancient Samaria, which Herod had changed to Σεβαστή in honour of Augustus. The form Σεβάστεια—as in the case of other towns of this name—was presumably also used, as the Arabic name (which is sometimes also written Sabaṣṭiyya) suggests. By the end of the classical period, the town, overshadowed by the neighbouring Neapolis (Sichem; Arabic, Nābulus), had sunk to be a small town (πολίκνιον) and played only an unimportant part in the Arab period. It was conquered by ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ while Abū Bakr ¶ was still caliph; the inh…

, a town in Diyār Muḍar [ q.v.] on the most southerly of the three roads from Bīred̲j̲ik [ q.v.] to Urfa [see al-ruhā ] in 36° 58′ N. lat. and 38° 27′ E. long. As the name of the town is also that of the district, its relation to the ancient names Anthemusia and Batnae is disputed; see Bibl . On account of the fertility of the district in which the town is situated, and its central position between the Euphrates on the one side, and Urfa and Ḥarrān [ q.v.], from each of which it is about a day’s journey distant, on the other, the traffic through it brought it a certain degree of prosp…

, a name formed in the same way as Diyār Bakr [ q.v.], is the province of the Ḏj̲azīra whose territory is watered by the Euphrates and its tributary the Balīk̲h̲ as well as by the lower reaches of the K̲h̲ābūr. It extends on both banks of the Euphrates from Sumaysāṭ (Samosata) in the north to ʿAnā (ʿĀnāt) in the south. The principal town of the Diyār Muḍar was al-Raḳḳa on the left bank of the Euphrates; other major towns were Ḥarrān on the Balīk̲h̲, Edessa (al-Ruhā, Urfa), capital of Osrhoene, and Sarūd̲j̲ …

, name of a part of the frontier zone which extended between the Byzantine Empire and the Empire of the Caliphs in the North and North-East of Syria. The forward strongholds of this zone are called al-T̲h̲ug̲h̲ūr [ q.v.] or frontier. strongholds properly so called, whilst those which were situated further to the rear, are called al-ʿAwāṣim , literally "the protectresses" (sing, al-ʿāṣima ). Following their quick successes in Syria and Mesopotamia, the Arabs for a while made no attempt to extend their conquests and confined themselves to making raids into Byz…

b. dāʾūd b. al-ḏj̲arrāḥ , ʿAbbāsid vizier, b. 245/859 into a family of Persian origin settled at Dayr Ḳunnā on the Tigris below Bag̲h̲dād, who had probably turned Christian before their adoption of Islam. Many of his relatives, including his father and grandfather, were officials in the ʿAbbāsid administration, and he himself seems to have received his first secretarial employment at the age of nineteen or twenty. In 278/892, on the formation of the dīwān al-dār by Aḥmad b. al-Furāt, both ʿAlī and his uncle Muḥammad b. Dāʾūd were employed in that …

or al-ruhāʾ , the Arabic name of a city which was in early Islamic times in the province of Diyār Muḍar [ q.v.] but known in Western sources as edessa (Syriac Orhāy, Armenian Uṛhay). It is now in the province of Diyarbakir in the southeast of modern Turkey and is known as Urfa, a name for the city which is not clearly attested before the coming of the Turks to eastern Anatolia. 1. In pre-Islamic times. The city is probably an ancient one, though efforts to identify it with the Babylonian Erech/Uruk or with Ur of the Chaldees cannot be taken seriously. Its site, at the j…

, an ancient town and military district in Syria; the name is of Aramaic origin and appears as Kennes̲h̲rīn in the Syriac texts. Composed of ḳinnā “nest” and nasrīn “of eagles”, it is mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud in the form of Kannis̲h̲rayyā and the European historians of the Middle Ages called the area Canestrine. A distinction must be drawn between the town and the d̲j̲und . 1. The town. At the present day, Ḳinnasrīn is nothing more than a little village surrounded by ruins, a day’s journey to the south of Aleppo, on the right bank of the Ḳuwayḳ which …

or ʿAyn Warda , Syriac Rēs̲h̲ ʿAynā, a town of classical and mediaeval Islamic times of al-D̲j̲azīra, deriving its name (“spring-head”) from the famed springs of the locality (see below). It is situated on the Greater K̲h̲ābūr [ q.v.] affluent of the Euphrates in lat. 36° 50′ N. and long. 40° 02′ E. It is now little more than a village straddling the modern border between Syria and Turkey, with the Syrian settlement still known as Raʾs al-ʿAyn and the Turkish one as Resülayn or Ceylânpinar. In classical times it was known as Resaina-Theodosiopolis, receiving from the Emperor Theo…

, a family name (borne by a number of apparently unrelated families) which was given great and deserved lustre by three brothers, Mad̲j̲d al-Dīn, ʿIzz al-Dīn, and Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn, who achieved literary fame in the fields of, respectively, philology and religious studies, historiography, and literary criticism. Their father, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm (often but apparently incorrectly: Muḥ. b. Muḥ. b. ʿAbd al-Karīm), whose life spanned the largest part of the 6th/12th century, was a high official of the Zangids of Mosul, stationed in Ḏj̲azīrat Ibn ʿUmar (hence the nisba al-D̲j̲azarī). H…

, an old-established town of eastern Anatolia, not far from the upper Euphrates. It lies at the junction of important roads (in antiquity: the Persian royal road and the Euphrates route; in modern times Samsūn-Siwās-Malaṭya-Diyārbakr and Ḳayṣariyya-Albistān-Malaṭya-K̲h̲arpūt) in a plain (the fertility and richness of which in all kinds of vegetables and fruits was celebrated by the Arab geographers, as in modern times by von Moltke and others) at the northern foot of the Taurus, not very far sou…

is the Arabic name of the Euphrates, called in Sumerian bu-ra-nu-nu, Assyr. Purātu , Hebrew , Syriac ; in Old Persian it was ¶ called Ufrātu , whence Middle Persian Frat , modern Turkish Firat . On the name and the notices by authors in antiquity see Pauly-Wissowa, art. Euphrates (by Weissbach). The main stream of the Euphrates is formed by the junction of two principal arms, now called the Karasu (length 450 km./280 miles) and the Murad-suyu (650 km./400 miles). The former, though the shorter, long bore (and in its lower course still bears) t…

, Abu ’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Abi ’l-Hayd̲j̲āʾ ʿAbd Allāh b. Ḥamdān b. Ḥamdūn b. al-Ḥārit̲h̲ Sayf al-Dawla al-Tag̲h̲libī (17 D̲h̲u ’l-Ḥid̲j̲d̲j̲a 303-24 Ṣafar 356/22 June 916-9 February 967), amīr of Aleppo and of northern Syria, also of Mayyāfāriḳīn and of western D̲j̲azīra (Diyār Bakr and Diyār Muḍar), from 333/945 until his death. From his time until the present day, he has personified the Arab chivalrous ideal in its most tragic aspect. A peerless warrior, magnanimous vanquisher of rebellious Syrian tribes, he led with audacity, and for a long time with success, the d̲j̲ihād …

(a. pls. sufun , safāʾin , safīn ), a word used in Arabic from pre-Islamic times onwards for ship. Seamanship and navigation are in general dealt with in milāḥa , and the present article, after dealing with the question of knowledge of the sea and ships in Arabia at the time of the birth of Islam, not covered in milāḥa, will be confined to a consideration of sea and river craft. 1. In the pre-modern period. (a) Pre-Islamic and early Islamic aspects. The most general word for “ship” in early Arabic usage was markab “conveyance”, used, however, …