Talk:Charax Spasinu

Comments

I can't see any logical reason for keeping this article separate from the one on Charax (Tigris). John Hill 03:09, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Reference

Can anyone tell me where can I find the reference s/he take Pliny's saying from? I found it completelty different here, exactly in: Excerpt from Natural History, Book VI – Chapter: The Tigris. Ralhazzaa 06:16, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

External link

One might want to check where it is supposed to be pointing to. All I am getting at the moment is Not found The requested resource does not exist on this server. --82.207.248.49 23:00, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Reference

I have just fixed the reference to the quote from Pliny on the main page. Hope you find that O.K. John Hill 00:44, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

etymology

If the name is Greek then why aren't any of the many places called Charax in Greece? Abu America (talk) 20:32, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Yuluo 于羅 = Charax Spasinou.

Dear User:Abu America: Thank you for bringing this interesting point to our attention. I will take the liberty of quoting part of the note I have written on this subject in my new book, Through the Jade Gate to Rome: A Study of the Silk Routes during the Later Han Dynasty, 1st to 2nd Centuries CE, p. 246. (2009). BookSurge, Charleston, South Carolina. ISBN 978-1-4392-2134-1, as I think, after reflecting further, that it indicates the probable origin of the word:

The reconstructed pronunciation of Yuluo in the Han period (*ka-ra) provides an excellent transcription of the Greek Хάραξ (Charax) – meaning a ‘pointed stake’ or ‘pole’ (and collectively) a ‘palisaded,’ or ‘entrenched camp.’ Хάρακα means palisade = Latin vallum. GEL, p. 1977. Both forms are closely related to the Aramaic karkhā “fortified settlement, town.” See the quote from Bosworth below. Hirth (1875), p. 156, n. 1, states that: “Χάραξ in Greek, and Karka in Syriac (see Kiepert, 1, c., p. 146) means “town” or “city.” Another place with the identical Chinese name, Yuluo 于羅, described in the Weilüe is clearly to be found in a very different location than the one described in the Hou Hanshu and which, I believe, represents al-Karak (this name also deriving from Greek ‘Charax’), in modern Jordan. See Hill (2004): Section 20, and n. 20.1. Charax was a common Greek name for fortified towns. For example, Isidore of Charax (Spasinou) mentions both ‘Charax Sidae’ (“called by the Greeks the city of Anthemusias”) near Apamia, and plain ‘Charax’ near the site of modern Tehran. See Hill (2004): Section 20; Schoff (1914), pp. 3, 7.

My interpretation of this now is that the word was probably originally Syriac and/or Aramaic and adopted by the Greeks who then used it in the territories of their Seleucid Empire. Please let me know if you have any disagreement with this theory. Sincerely, John Hill (talk) 22:54, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

That seems quite unlikely. The word χάραξ (accusative χάρακα) is a Greek word with a variety of uses, only one of which refers to a fort, and it is connected with the verb χαράσσω ‘to scratch, engrave, or sharpen’. That verb is exceedingly unlikely to be borrowed from a foreign word meaning ‘castle’ for two reasons:

• it has distinct Attic (χαράκττω) and Ionic (χαράσσω) dialectical forms, which is not likely to be the case for a loanword unless it were of extreme antiquity
• the semantic broadening from ‘castle’ to ‘scratch, engrave, or sharpen’ is a real stretch; a semantic evolution from ‘scratch, engrave, or sharpen’ to ‘sharp stake’ to ‘palisade’ to ‘castle’ is far more likely.

Also, a hypothetical Greek borrowing of an Aramaic karkâ would be unlikely to result in a third-declension noun like χάραξ, where only the accusative resembles the putative source word. (Third-declension or athematic nouns are typically the most ancient nouns in the old Indo-European languages, much older than the thematic nouns of the first and second declensions.) The borrowing would be more convincing if the resulting form were a first-declension noun *χάρακα(ς) with accusative *χάρακαν.

Finally, the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography cites four places named Charax in Anatolia and one in modern-day Lybia. None of these places was ever predominantly Syriac/Aramaic speaking, but all were sites of Greek settlement well before Alexander. The fact that none of the places are in present-day Greece is not significant; virtually all of the places in the world called Fort X are in former British colonies, not in England, but it not make sense to extrapolate from that the idea that fort must be a borrowing from some indigenous North American language. Tkinias (talk) 20:24, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

Charax in Kuwait?

It is stated twice in the article that the original location of Charax was in present day Kuwait. This is based on a single sentence in the three volume work by John Pairman Brown: "The city Charax was originally, before silting from the two great rivers stranded it inland, on the coast of the Persian Gulf NE of what is now Kuwait.". This sentence doesn't say that the city was located within the current territory of Kuwait, neither does it say that the city has moved from one locality to another. What it does say and/or imply is that silt carried downstream by the rivers accumulated at the coast, causing the coastline to gradually move southwards and causing the city to be no longer located on the coast, i.e. it was "stranded" inland. The specific location of the remains of Charax is at Naysān (Iraq) in Southern Iraq, to the north of Basrah. So, I'm going to remove the references to Kuwait. Alfons Åberg (talk) 04:27, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

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Merge

Naysān (Iraq) and this page are obviously about exactly the same site. Since this page seems to be the more mature page, I would suggest moving Naysān (Iraq) into this one. Best, --Zoeperkoe (talk) 11:28, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

Not Merge

As of 2018, we have a tell in southern Iraq called Naysan and we also have a City discussed from antiquity called many things but I will refer to it as Charax Spasinu.

While the ruins at the site of Naysan does exhibit almost all of the attributes of the ancient city including a similar shape and location, the two items at the moment have not conclusively been established as the same thing, and they remain I believe two different things, one an entity in the written history of the area and the other a mound of dirt with archaeology.

I suggest they should remain separate articles.

DARC12345 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 110.174.62.147 (talk) 05:26, 23 July 2018 (UTC)