Khurasan Road
historical highway in Iran
The (Great) Khurasan Road was the great trunk road connecting Mesopotamia to the Iranian Plateau and thence to Central Asia, China, and the Indus Valley.
It is very well-documented in the Abbasid period, when it connected the core of the capital city of Baghdad with the northeastern province of Khurasan.
History
Archaeological findings suggest the road was in regular use in the 3rd millennium BC, connecting Central Asia with Mesopotamia. During the Achaemenid period, the road constituted the eastern segment of the Royal Road system.
Course
The Achaemenid road began from the Median capital city of Ecbatana and terminated at the Central Asian city of Bactra (Balkh), passing through Rhagae (Rey), the Caspian Gates (modern Tang-e Sar-e Darra), Hyrcania, and Parthia. The Grand Trunk Road connected Bactra to the Indus Valley.
The Khurasan Road is possibly the best documented of the roads of the Abbasid realm; not only is it described in detail by Ibn Rustah, but most other medieval Muslim geographers such as Qudama ibn Ja'far and Ibn Khordadbeh refer to it and give distances along its various stretches in their works. The road began at the Khurasan Gate on the eastern side of the Round City of al-Mansur, and exited the city at the second Khurasan Gate of East Baghdad.
The first settlement after Baghdad was Nahrawan or Jisr Nahrawan ("Bridge of Nahrawan"), named after the great Nahrawan Canal which passed through it. In the Abbasid period it was prosperous, but was abandoned and fell in ruin when the road moved north to Ba'quba.
“Khurasan Road” enters the record as historical highway in Iran. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Khurasan, Road and historical can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21811971. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Khurasan Road” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.