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 it 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 it is located in the lands of the Al-Husayniyah district near Nineveh. The ruins located in the northwest of Karbala, known as “Old Karbala,” have been extracted from some of the pottery vessels in which the Babylonians used to bury their dead (1). 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 is a hollow in the feet, and it is said that he came walking in a hollow in a nut. According to this, the land of this place is soft, so it was named thus (2). It was also called “Baka’ir,” which is the low-lying lands that include the place of the grave of al-Husayn (peace be upon him) to the corridor of his holy site. The water around it boiled during the reign of al-Mutawakkil al-Abbasi. The shrine and this place were spacious, extended by a series of extended hills and connected hills in the northern, western, and southern directions, forming for the observers a semicircle, the entrance of which is the eastern front, from which the visitor heads to the resting place of our master al-Abbas. Ibn Ali (PBUH), in addition to what was mentioned by the magazine (New Iraq) 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-Hussein goes back to the fact that it is Assyrian, composed of two words, ((Karba – Ilu)), and their meaning is the proximity of the god, and they rely on that 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 accordingly ((Karba – Ilu)) in reference to what the new Nineveh provided them with in terms of a good atmosphere in which they forgot their exile. (3)

(1) Al-Ta’mah, Salman Hadi, Karbala Heritage, Al-A’lami Foundation for Publications – Karbala, first edition, 1964, p. 18.

(2) Yaqut Al-Hamawi, Dictionary of Countries, 3rd ed., Dar Al-Kutub Al-Ilmiyyah, Beirut, 2004, p. 213.

(3) Al-Ta’mah, Salman Hadi, Karbala Heritage, previous source, p. 113.