History
In ancient times, the area where the city exists today was under the waters of the Persian Gulf, before becoming a part of the vast marshlands and the tidal flats at the mouth of the Karun River. The small town known as Piyan, and later Bayan appeared in the area no sooner than the late Parthian time in the 1st. Century AD. Whether or not this was located at the where Khurramshahr is today, is highly debatable.
During the Islamic centuries, the Daylamite Buwayhid king, Panah Khusraw Adud ad-Dawlah ordered the digging of a canal to join Karun River (which at the time emptied independently into the Persian Gulf through the Bahmanshir channel, to the Arvand Rud/Shatt al-Arab (the joint estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The extra water made the joint estuary more reliably navigable. The channel thus created was known as the Haffar, Arabic for "excavated," "dugout," which exactly described what the channel was. The Haffar soon became the main channel of the Karun, as it is in the present day. Establishment of a port town at the confluence of the Haffar and the Arvand Rud/Shatt al-Arab is natural and may be expected. However, there is absolutely no mention of such a place in the geographical records, while there are an ample mentions of the port of Abadan nearby.
The modern city was founded in 1812 by Sheikh Yusuf bin Mardo, when steam navigation began on the Karun, who named it Muhammarah (Arabic for 'reddish,' an allusion to the red clay fort build by the Sheikh in the port). The name remained until the 1930s, when the Iranian Academy of Culture (the Farhangistan), in its extensive amending of toponyms in Iran/Persia, renamed the city Khurram Shahr, "The Pleasant City."
Read more about this topic: Khorramshahr
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