Late Antique and Early Islamic Hira - Urbanistic Transformationprocesses in a Transregional Contact Zone

• Applicants: Dr. Margarete van Ess; Privatdozentin Dr. Martina Müller-Wiener; Professorin Dr.-Ing. Thekla Schulz-Brize
• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439903522

Located in southern central Iraq, al-Ḥīra was a place of supra-regional importance in the 5th and 6th centuries. After the Islamic conquest, the former residence of the Lahmid dynasty developed into one of the leading urban centers of the Islamic world, together with the neighbouring newly founded al-Kufa. The focus of the multidisciplinary research project is on the archaeologically and historically based reconstruction of the settlement history of al-Ḥīra. The study focuses on the transformation processes triggered by the changes in political and economic conditions in the 7th century. How did the coming into power of new elites manifest itself in changes in settlement morphology, infrastructure, building typologies and construction methods? The creation of a stratigraphically based chronology of the settlement history and its constituent elements as well as the evaluation of the results in a supra-regional context promise fundamental insights into the architectural history and the dynamics of urbanistic processes in late antique and early Islamic Iraq. The discussion about early Islamic urbanism is thus extended to include an important metropolitan area whose geographical and historical framework clearly differs from the well-studied late antique landscapes of Greater Syria.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Netherlands
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Karsten Lambers
• Co-Investigator: Burkart Ulrich