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Baghdad
An illustrated miniature in the style of the medieval Baghdad school: robed figures gathered under arches, painted in flat jewel colours with gold outlining.
Editorial

Baghdad · Iraq

One Thousand and One Nights as a Visual Network

The book that taught Europe to picture the East arrived with no pictures at all. Three centuries of illustrators — Dutch, Egyptian, Persian, French, German, Iraqi — each gave it a face, and every face was a self-portrait.

Open Galland's Thousand and One Nights, the edition that conquered Europe, and there is nothing to look at: no genie, no lamp, not one illustration. The most visually imagined book in the world began blind — and because its text was never fixed either, no picture of it could ever be a copy.

The white marble dome and framing minarets of the Taj Mahal in Agra, mirrored in the still water of its reflecting pool at dawn.
Editorial

Baghdad · Iraq

Where Is Agrabah? The City Disney Assembled From Real Places

Agrabah was going to be Baghdad. A war made it fictional — and then Disney built it back out of real places, from a tomb in Agra to a valley in Jordan that usually plays Mars.

The Sultan's palace where Princess Jasmine feels trapped has the silhouette of the Taj Mahal — which is not a palace at all, but a tomb. That is how Agrabah works. Disney's fairy-tale city was going to be Baghdad, until the Gulf War made the name impossible; the studio invented a place that could not be found on a map, then quietly rebuilt it out of real ones — Isfahan and Agra, Marrakesh and Mandalay, a Jordanian desert that has played both Arabia and Mars.

A vast circle of fire burning on a dark plain at night — the outline of a city with four radial roads, drawn in flame.
Editorial

Baghdad · Iraq

The City With No Ruins: What Is Left of Abbasid Baghdad

A caliph drew his capital in fire, the Mongols erased it, and a video game rebuilt it out of Isfahan and Samarkand. What actually survives of Abbasid Baghdad, where it is, and who else has tried to put it back.

Climb a viewpoint in Assassin's Creed Mirage and you see the Round City whole — double walls, four gates, the green dome at the centre. Nobody has ever seen that view. No excavated remains have been securely identified as any of it. This is what is actually left of ninth-century Baghdad, where you would have to go to stand in it, and why Ubisoft was the second team to rebuild a city that no longer exists.