Abdallah, the Carpet, and the Cross
Two centuries back, then. In the eighth century the frontier town of Erzurum—Theodosiopolis, as it then was—became a casualty of a quarrel Byzantium had gone to some trouble to pick with the Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus. In the year 700 the young amīr Abdallah ibn Abd al-Malik, a son of the caliph, was given his first independent command: to deal with the Byzantine general Heraclius, who had been making a nuisance of himself along the Arab frontier. Abdallah dealt with him thoroughly. Theodosiopolis fell, and he rode on into Armenia Minor. Three years later he was helping his uncle Muhammad ibn Marwan put down an Armenian revolt—whence his reputation as a subduer of Armenians, a line of work in which he never lacked employment.
He was next sent to Egypt as wālī, and applied himself there with the same energy. His uncle Abd al-Aziz had run the province for twenty years as very nearly a private estate, taking pains to keep the local grandees sweet; Abdallah dismissed his uncle’s appointees and ruled that official business be conducted in Arabic rather than Coptic. Whereupon Egypt suffered the first famine of the Islamic period—a coincidence, no doubt, though contemporaries found it a suggestive one. He was accused of embezzlement, recalled, and relieved of his accumulated gains.
After which he vanishes from the chronicles for the better part of forty years, and reappears in a single sentence. In 750 the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads and set about exterminating the family with method; al-Ya‘qubi records that Abdallah was crucified at al-Hira on the orders of the caliph al-Saffah. A man who made his name fighting Christians thus ended on a cross—and not, one notes, at Christian hands.
As for Theodosiopolis, Byzantium had a long wait. The city stayed Arab, became Qaliqala and the seat of a frontier emirate, and only in 949 did Constantinople get it back—just in time to hand it to the Georgians.
What Was Left of Qaliqala
Having taken the city, the Arabs named it in Armenian—or rather, as they heard it. The Armenian name of Theodosiopolis was Karin, in full Karnoy k‘aghak‘, “the city of Karin”; in Arabic this came out as قاليقلا, Qaliqala, the second half being Armenian քաղաք /kʰɑˈʁɑkʰ/, “town.” The letter ղ, conventionally transliterated gh, in fact stands for a lateral sound, which is what Arab ears made of it: hence -qalā. It has nothing to do with Arabic قلعة or Turkish kale, “fortress”—though Arabs can hardly have failed to hear their own qalʿa in it, and what could be more natural than a fort in the name of a frontier town?
Then the usual fate of long foreign names overtook it: it was clipped. Qaliqala was famous for its carpets, and the geographer Yaqut reports that the carpets were called qālī, after the town, shortened. Hence Persian قالی (qālī), Turkish halı, Urdu qaleen: half of Asia walks on half of an Armenian phrase. Doerfer argued for a Turkic source instead, so the matter is not quite settled.
A second carpet word lay beside it in Persian, and it had come from the opposite direction. Persian گلیم (gilīm) is akin to Aramaic גלימא (galīmā), “blanket, cloak,” and both go back to Greek κάλυμμα, “covering,” from καλύπτω, “to cover.” The same root sits in the nymph Calypso, the concealer, and in the eucalyptus, whose flower is “well covered” by its little cap. Persian, handed two words from two directions, divided the labour neatly between them: qālī for the pile carpet, gilīm for the flatweave. Turkish inherited the pair intact as halı and kilim, and by Ottoman transmission kilim spread through the Balkans and beyond—Ukrainian килим, Polish kilim, Serbian ćilim, and, in the nineteenth century, English kilim itself.
English, then, ended up with three words for the thing, and the two homegrown ones are precisely the ones that cannot explain themselves. Rug is Scandinavian, connected with Norwegian rugga, a coarse coverlet, and belonging somewhere in the same tangle as rag and rough—but the details are guesswork. The word we reach for daily turns out to be the murkiest in the room.
Carpet is murkier still, and more interesting. The standard etymology takes it from Latin carpere, to pluck, by way of carpita, thick woollen cloth—named for the teased wool it was woven from. But there is a rival account: Middle Armenian կարպետ (karpet), arriving in Europe in the thirteenth century with the Cilician rug trade; an old word, already present as kapert in the fifth-century Armenian Bible. The question is unsettled, and both parties may well be right. A foreign word survives best when the language already has one that sounds like it—which is, after all, exactly what happened to Qaliqala.
(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
