Shiraz bottled poetry, gardens, and Elamite workshop names
Shiraz, fifth-largest Iranian city and Fars capital—historic Persia proper—held 1,565,572 people in the 2016 census. Elamite tablets near 2000 BCE mention Tiraziš workshops; Sasanian founding, Umayyad restoration in 693 CE, and Saffarid–Buyid bloom made it a garden city of poets and flowers.
The name has survived remarkable change. Elamite tablets from the Persepolis treasury record workshops at a place spelled roughly Tirazzish, which became Old Persian shirajish and, by regular sound shifts, modern Shiraz; the name also turns up on clay sealings from a second-century Sasanian ruin east of the city. The linguist Zana Salehrad suggests it may once have meant sunlit plain. Scholars disagree about its early size: Berney and Ring think it was little more than a way-station, while Abdolmajed Arfaee points to 84 archive tablets and work gangs of up to 490 people as evidence of an important settlement.
The Islamic city took shape after Arab armies from Basra captured the area in 641. In 693 Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Thaqafi, brother of the Umayyad viceroy al-Hajjaj, founded or rebuilt it. In the late ninth century the Saffarid ruler Ya'qub ibn al-Layth made it the capital of a state covering most of modern Iran.
Its peak came under the Buyids. 'Adud al-Dawla ruled Fars from 949 to 983 and in 977 added Iraq, reducing the Abbasid caliphs to puppets of a Shiraz-based court. He endowed a large library, a hospital, mosques, bazaars, caravanserais and gardens and sponsored medical and religious scholarship; the city then had twelve quarters and eight gates, and it traded in grapes, linen, cotton, rosewater and costly rugs. Benjamin of Tudela counted 10,000 Jews there in 1170.
Shrewd diplomacy spared it twice: local rulers submitted to Genghis Khan and, in 1382, to Tamerlane. By the thirteenth century geographers called it the House of Knowledge, and it produced the poets Saadi and Hafez, whose tombs lie on its northern edge. Today the Eram Garden and inlaid mosaic, silverware and kilim weaving draw visitors, and the 2021 census put the population near two million.
Source: Shiraz
