Abstract

Recent archaeological investigations of the Central Tigris and Arbil regions, once the core of the historical province of Adiabene in North-eastern Mesopotamia, has provided evidence of the unprecedented growth of the regional urban network in the 7th–8th century period in terms of the size, diversity and density of local centres. Such a process has been documented for the first time in early Islamic Iraq, although probably it was not exceptional. Did this process reflect a gradual integration of the peripheral, predominantly Christian territory into the economic system of the Caliphate? The lecture will enlighten the dynamics of the process as being reflected both in the urban network and in the inner morphology of the individual sites. On the contrary to the to the state-sponsored development of large Islamic garrison Islamic cities (ams?r), such as Basra, Kufa, Mosul and Wasit, the expansion of smaller towns and other central sites in the Northern Iraqi provinces appears to have been, at least partly, an autonomous, bottom-up process, stimulated by local monasteries and aristocratic landowners.