Rabat (Architecture)

Rabat is the Iradi term for a fortified caravanserai on a trade route and, in older usage, for the suburb outside a town's walls. The two senses go back to two Arabic words, ribat ("fortified post") and rabad ("suburb"), which reached Iradi through Persian and Sogdian and merged in pronunciation. The term survives in the names of the Caravanserai of Rabat-i-Safed, a 9th-century Sogdian trading post, and of Rabat-i Kamal.