Middle Eastern City Name Generator

Middle Eastern city names come from at least five naming traditions, and a convincing invented one borrows the grammar of the right one. Arabic place names stack a descriptor on a noun: Ras (headland), Wadi (valley), Ain (spring), Bir (well), Tal (mound), Deir (monastery), Umm and Abu (mother and father of), Qasr (castle), Bab (gate), Dar (house) and Madinat (city), usually with the article al-, as in Madinat al-Zahra or Ras al-Khaimah. Persian names favor compounds ending in -abad (settled by), -shahr (city) and Bandar-e (port of), giving Mehrabad, Golshahr and Bandar Abbas. Turkish towns end in -hisar (fortress), -kale (castle), -koy (village) and -sehir (city), Kurdish names carry hard consonant clusters like Halabja and Darbandikhan, and Hebrew uses Kfar, Beit, Tel, Ramat, Kiryat, Ein and Mitzpe as prefixes.

The list mixes real cities (Aleppo, Muscat, Tabriz, Gaziantep, Erbil, Jaffa), ancient ones that still anchor any historical or biblical map (Babylon, Nineveh, Ugarit, Hatra, Megiddo, Caesarea) and invented names assembled from those same parts, such as Qasr al-Rimal, Bab al-Qamar, Kavirshahr, Camlihisar and Kiryat Nahar.

Real names are useful as reference for how the pieces fit together; the invented ones are ready to drop onto a fantasy map, a spy thriller or a historical setting without colliding with an actual place.