VIRTUAL London Heritages Conference

Abstract

In the year 762 CE the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mansur founded the Round City of Baghdad as the new capital, signaling a move eastward for the Islamic world. The location of the new city was strategic, along the Tigris and adjacent to a preexisting neighborhood, Al-Karkh – home to a bustling market the Caliph used to his advantage. The latest iteration of the celebrated historical-action video game, Assassin’s Creed, is set in Abbasid Baghdad with a pivotal moment in the narrative occurring in Al-Karkh’s souks. Since the Mongol siege of 1258 destroyed nearly all the Round City, there are few archeological remains, and so histories of Abbasid-era Al-Karkh, and of Abbasid Baghdad in general, depend entirely on written testimony from historians, geographers, and poets. Through an analysis of various depictions of Abbasid-era Al-Karkh, from primary and secondary historical sources, as well as Abbasid-era poetry, and Assassin’s Creed Mirage (2023), this paper argues that in addition to the center-periphery relationships we can think of between Al-Karkh and Baghdad, there is also an epistemological center-periphery relationship, the center being the through-line of Al-Karkh as a diverse, commercial center, which is the basis for its depictions in the historiography of its media representations, and the periphery being other aspects of its character which come out of this central basis and reinforce it, creating heterogenous, and sometimes contradictory, representations. It matters less whether representations of Al-Karkh are true or not, rather, the possibility of our belief in their potential truth is what is valuable. This possibility of potential truth lies in the relationship which representations can craft between their own depictions and the central understandings of Al-Karkh, which is as a commercial center. This paper is an inquiry into how historiographies of a ‘lost’ city are crafted, and how we may engage with their various representations and depictions.