Note 435 — Chapter XVI · BAGDAD

Bagdad, at the zenith of its grandeur under Harun-al-Rashid, was the worthy successor of Babylon and Nineveh. It “had outrivalled Damascus, ‘the Smile of the Prophet,’” and “was essentially a city of pleasure, a Paris of the ninth century.” “Thither flocked from all parts of the oriental world the most noted and capable poets, musicians and artificers of the time; and the first thought of the Arabian or Persian craftsman who had completed some specially curious or attractive specimen of his art was to repair to the capital of the Muslim world, to submit it to the Commander of the Faithful from whom he rarely failed to receive a rich reward for his labors. Surrounded by pleasure-gardens and groves of orange, tamarisk, and myrtle, refreshed by an unfailing luxuriance of running streams, supplied either by art or nature, the great city on the Tigris is the theme of many an admiring ode or laudatory ghazel; and the poets of the time all agree in describing it as being, under the rule of the great Caliph, a sort of terrestrial paradise of idlesse and luxury, where, to use their own expressions, the ground was irrigated with rose-water and the dust of the roads was musk, where flowers and verdure overhung the ways and the air was perpetually sweet with the many-voiced song of birds, and where the chirp of lutes, the dulcet warble of flutes and the silver sound of singing houris rose and fell in harmonious cadence from every corner of the streets of palaces that stood in vast succession in the midst of their gardens and orchards, gifted with perpetual verdure by the silver abundance of the Tigris, as it sped its arrowy flight through the thrice-blest town.” Thousand and One Nights, Vol. IX, pp. 333, 334 (translated by John Payne, London, 1884).