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(present-day (Tkish.) Tilbeşar Kalesi; Armenian Thilpašar, Thil Aveteač; Frankish Turbessel), a fortress and walled town of the ¶ north Syrian borderlands, in present-day southern Turkey, 25 km/15 miles south-east of the city of Gaziantep (ʿAynṭāb [ q.v.]), near the village of Gundoğdu. Although mentioned as early as Assyrian times, the detailed history of Tall Bās̲h̲ir begins at the end of the 5th/11th century, testimony to its position in the path of powers seeking to expand east or west. In 489/1096 the Sald̲j̲ūḳ ruler of Aleppo, Riḍwān b. Tutus̲h̲ [ q.v.], captured it from Yag̲h…

, the most important of the four great cities of K̲h̲urāsān (Nīs̲h̲āpūr, Marw, Harāt and Balk̲h̲), one of the great towns of Persia in the Middle Ages. The name goes back to the Persian Nēw-S̲h̲āhpūr (“Fair S̲h̲āpūr”); in Armenian it is called Niu-S̲h̲apuh, Arab. Naysābūr or Nīsābūr, New Pers. Nēs̲h̲āpūr, pronounced in the time of Yāḳūt Nīs̲h̲āwūr, now Nīs̲h̲āpūr (Nöldeke, Ṭabarī , 59, n. 3; G. Hoffmann, Auszüge …, 61, n. 530). The town occasionally bore the official title of honour, Īrāns̲h̲ahr. Nīs̲h̲āpūr was founded by S̲h̲āhpūhr I, son of Ardas̲h̲īr I (Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī, …

or Tortosa , earlier Anṭarṭūs, frequently Anṭarsūs (by analogy with Ṭarsūs), a town on the Syrian coast, the ancient Antarados opposite the island of Arados (Ar. D̲j̲azīrat Arwād, also written Arwād̲h̲; now Ruwād; concerning the Arab conquest of the island, see L.I. Conrad, The conquest of Arwād : a source-critical study in the historiography of the early medieval Near East , in Averil Cameron and Conrad (eds.), The Byzantine and early Islamic Near East . I. Problems in the literary source material, Princeton 1992, 317-401). Under the Roman empire, Antarados was called Const…

, ḳalʿat al-rūm , a fortress in mediaeval northern Syria, which lay on the right bank of the Euphrates river where it takes its great westernmost bend, hence to the north-north-west of Bīred̲j̲ik [ q.v.]. Its site accordingly comes within the modern Turkish province ( il) of Gaziantep. According to Arnold Nöldeke’s description, it is situated “on a steeply sloping-tongue of rock, lying along the right bank of the Euphrates, which bars the direct road to the Euphrates from the west for its tributary the Merziman as it breaks through the edge o…

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…

, in European sources usually rendered as Mosul, a city of northern Mesopotamia or ʿIrāḳ, on the west bank of the Tigris and opposite to the ancient Nineveh. In early Islamic times it was the capital of Diyār Rabīʿa [ q.v.], forming the eastern part of the province of al-D̲j̲azīra [ q.v.]. At the present time, it is the third largest city of the Republic of ʿIrāḳ. 1. History up to 1900. Al-Mawṣil takes its name from the fact that a number of arms of the river there combine (Arabic, waṣala ) to form a single stream. The town lies close beside the Tigris on a spur of the western steppeplateau ¶ which juts …