It was interesting to note that the name "Baghdad" the current capital of Iraq derived its name from Sanskrit Bhagwan + Daata (Gift of God). The name was given in 762 AD. Caliph al-Mansur (ruled 754 - 775) engaged Indian architects and engineers to design the new Abbasad capital as per Alexander Berzin. http://www.berzinarchives.com/islam/history_afghanistan_buddhism.html
Many Sanskrit books were also translated in Iraq. The books included: Jatakmala (Buddha's birth stories). Also An Umayyad Arab author, al-Kermani, wrote a detailed account of Nava Vihara at the beginning of the eighth century, preserved in the tenth-century work Kitab al-Budan by al-Hamadhani.
Yahya ibn Barmak, the Muslim grandson of one of the Buddhist administrative heads (Skt.: pramukha, Arabic: barmak) of Nava Vihara Monastery, was the minister of the next Abbasad caliph, al-Rashid (ruled 786 - 808). Under his influence, the Caliph invited to Baghdad many more scholars and masters from India, especially Buddhists. A catalogue of both Muslim and non-Muslim texts prepared at this time, Kitab al-Fihrist, included a list of Buddhist works.
Also in nearby Iran, several books were translated. One of the book Amrtakunda
on yoga influenced Sufi system as per Carl W. Ernst.
WiseA$$ Padishah (Premier Login Padishah) Arab Legion
Oh, Please...
July 1 2004, 5:14 PM
Ravi, this is simply not true.
In fact, it is an outright fabrication and a lie.
This once again goes to show how Indians will "revise" history to overcome their intrinsic jealousy of the Turko-Persian/Iranian culture and civilization that has dominated them for so long over the last 3,500 years...
NOT ONE of these sources correlates anything you posted as historical fact.
Simply put, Baghdad bares no marks of Indian/Hindu architecture, culture and civilization. Baghdad was built ontop of a little "Persian" town, and its name literally translates into "City of God" in Sassanid-era Parsi. The term "Baghdad" may very well pay homage to a Sanskrit word, since Persian is a language derived from Sanskrit itself, afterall.
P.S...Any similarity between Mughal architecture, such as the Taj Mahal, and what is found in Baghdad, is strictly due to the Persian origin of that particular style, and the origins of the architects themselves...
next thing you know, ravi is gonna post a topic saying, the name Iran is Hindu origin, which actually means the land of Aryans and its pronounced IGHAEAYKEI lol
Persian is not derived from Sanskrit. Persian, along with other Iranian languages, including Ossetian, Alan, Kurdish, Dari... are derivatives of Avestan, which in turn was a sister language of Sanskrit. This can be corroborated by comparing the language used in Avesta to that of the Rig Vedas'. Even though both languages clearly have many affinities and belong to the same family, they are each on their own evolutionary paths.
Secondly, it might be argued that the name Baghdad, by extension, relates to Sanskrit, as do all Iranian languages (and vice versa, of course). But the word Baghdad itself, was definitely of direct Persian origin. As you might know Ravi, for the last 1100 years before the Arab invasion, with the exception of the Greek interlude, Mesapotamia was under Iranian rule. In fact the western Iranian capital, Ctesphon, was not too far away from Baghdad.
The meaning of the word is transliterated to "God gave". bagh=god, deity; plural=baghan. Daad= third person singular, past tense of verb daadan= to give. A similar contemporary name in Iran is Khodadaad (Khoda= same as God), which although not very common, is still used. Other similarly structured names are Mehrdaad (given by Mehr=Mithra), Tirdaad...
The funny thing is that I once posted somehting similar to this on a travel site, a guy I believe from Slovakia said Baghdad meant the exact same thing in his language. Go figure!!!
friends,the websites which i have shown are not by any streach of imagination hindu websites.one is a buddhist website and another is a university website.
Well, dataa in Hindi or Bengali is one who gives. And Bagh can be closely related to Bhagwan which is God.
Overall, I am more inclined to believe that it is a Persian derivative, although the presence of Indian intellectuals in the Arab caliphates is no surprise.
And yes, Persian is not a daughter of Sanskrit, but a niece. Sanskrit's daughter languages are Hindi/Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Rajasthani, Marathi, Bengali, Assamese, Odiya, Tamil, etc, practically, all the languages in India. Sanskrit's sister languages are Latin and the language from which Persian came, borozomghehr posted that.
How is this crack? It is quite commonly known about the origin of Hindusthan.
The Sanskrit name for India is Bharat, not Hindusthan nor India, in fact, in modern times, Hindusthan only refers to the part of the sub-continent where Hindi and/or Urdu is spoken.
The River Indus is known as Shindhu in Sanskrit. The Persians could not pronounce "sh" as in "shoe", so they made it Hindu. They called the land Hindusthan, the people Hindus.
Thereby, you have the term Hindusthan and the term Hindu. In fact, in our religious texts, there is no mention of a name for our religion, the name Hindu was something given to us by Persians in order to define us better.
It is like this, the whole world called people from Africa Africans, but the Africans themselves didn't give themselves that name, nor did they realize that they were all being clubbed together as one entity.
The Persians could not pronounce "sh" as in "shoe", so they made it Hindu. They called the land Hindusthan, the people Hindus.
i am as good as certain, that the sound "sh" exists in the Persian language since the antiquity... a great many very old Persian words contain "sh", such as Zartosht ('Zarathustra'), Khashayar ('Xerxes'), etc etc.
so, there should be some other explanation as to why the "sh" was axed.
This message has been edited by Qutrubulli on Jul 3, 2004 3:52 PM
Iranians cannot pronounce "sh"? LOL! Where do you think the word "shah" came from, Mongolia? The only sound Iranians have trouble with is "w" which they pronounce as "v" (just like the Turks I think) so that "watan" becomes "vatan" and so on.
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