Naming the city of Karbala

Ahlam Hassan Jassim Abdul Karim
Supervised by Asst. Prof. Dr. Fawaz Hamdan Abboud

The city of Karbala is considered one of the ancient Iraqi cities that dates back to the Babylonian era. Historians and researchers have been able to find out the word ((Karbala)) from the word’s coinage and linguistic analysis. It was said that it was coined from the Arabic word ((Kur Babylon)), which is a group of ancient Babylonian villages, including ((Nineveh)), which existed since ancient times and is now a series of archaeological hills extending from the south of the Hindiya Dam to the mouth of the Al-Alqami River in the marshes. Among them is ((Al-Ghadiriyah)), which is the flat lands that were a farm for Bani Asad and are located today north of Al-Hayabi and are known as the lands of Al-Hussainiya. Then (Karbala) with emphasis on the letter “lām” and is located to the east and south of Karbala, then ((Karbala or the heart of Babylon)) which is a village to the northwest of Ghadiriyah and its ruins contain important antiquities, then ((Al-Nawawis)) which was a public cemetery for Christians before the Islamic conquest and is located in the lands of the Al-Husayniyah district near Nineveh. The ruins located to the northwest of Karbala which are known as ((Old Karbala)) have been extracted from some ceramic pots in which the Babylonians used to bury their dead. Yaqut al-Hamawi referred in his dictionary to the meaning of Karbala for several possibilities, including Karbala with a long vowel, which is the place where al-Husayn ibn Ali (peace be upon him) was killed at the edge of the desert near Kufa. As for its derivation, Karbala / hollow in the feet, it is said that he came walking in Karbala in a nut, on this basis the land of this place is soft, so it was named that. It was also called ((Bakaer)) and it is the low lands that include the place of the grave of al-Husayn (peace be upon him) to the corridor of his holy spot, and the water heated up around it during the era of al-Mutawakkil al-Abbasi, and the shrine and this were spacious and extended with a series of extended hills and connected hills in the northern, western and southern sides of it, forming for the observers a semi-circle, the entrance to which is the eastern front from which the visitor heads to the resting place of our master al-Abbas ibn Ali (peace be upon him), in addition to what the magazine (New Iraq) mentioned in its subject, a historical glimpse of Karbala, where it said that the origin of the interpretation of the name of the city of al-Husayn goes back to it being Assyrian, composed of two words, which are (( Karba-Ilu)) and they both mean the proximity of the god, and they base this on a possibility that has not yet been confirmed, that a group of Assyrians inhabited this region after the destruction of their capital in the north ((Nineveh)) and they named their new settlement after their previous capital because of their strong attachment to it, so this land was called (Nineveh) and then it became known as ((Karba-Ilu)) in reference to the good atmosphere that the new Nineveh provided them in which they forgot their exile.