, a town of mediaeval ʿIrāḳ, lying, in the time of the classical Arabic geographers (3rd-4th/9th-10th centuries) on the left, i.e. eastern, bank of the Tigris, ten farsak̲h̲ s to the north of Bag̲h̲dād, roughly halfway between the capital and Sāmarrāʾ.
As Yāḳūt noted ( Buldān , ed. Beirut, iv, 142), the name is orginally Aramaic ( sūriyānī ), sc. ʿOkbarā, and the history of the place can be traced back at least to early Sāsānid times. In the reign of the emperor S̲h̲āpūr I (mid-3rd century A.D.), Roman captives were settled there, and by the reign of …