Its official name in Abbasid times was City of Peace (Arabic: مدينة السلام, romanized: Madīnat as-Salām).

Influenced by the apadana design of ancient Iranian architecture, the mosque was built with a hypostyle prayer-hall with wooden columns supporting its flat roof.

[9] As the host of one of the major intellectual centers in the Abbasid Caliphs, the Grand Library of Baghdad, also known as The House of Wisdom, was likely to have attracted scholars of several disciplines.

Among them, geographers, historians, or simple chroniclers provided extensive descriptions of the Madinat al-Mansur even years after the city's fading.

All the information we have today related to the physical characteristics, structural functions, and social life in Abbasid Baghdad comes from these literary sources which were revisited in the 20th century.

The definite revelation for the academic community of the existence of the Round City of Baghdad was recorded by Guy Le Strange, a British Orientalist prominent in the field of historical geography.

Le Strange himself wrote in the preface of his book: "(...) the real basis of the present reconstruction of the medieval plan is the description of the Canals of Baghdad written by Ibn Serapion in about the year a.d. 900.

By combining the network of the water system, as described by this writer, with the radiating high-roads, as described by his contemporary Yakubi, it has been possible to plot out the various quarters of older Baghdad, filling in details from the accounts of other authorities, which, taken alone, would have proved too fragmentary to serve for any systematic reconstruction of the plan.

"[13]A few years after Le Strange's first publication of the Round City's plan, a wave of German and British excavations was commissioned by emerging museums and universities.

The first one to improve Le Strange's initial plan was Ernst Herzfeld, a German archeologist who produced between 1905 and 1913 a large body of work including translations, drawings, field notes, photographs, and objects inventories from his excavations at Samarra and elsewhere in Iraq and Iran.

Concerned with the critical problems found in the original descriptive texts, Herzfeld, an architect by profession, offered new interpretations and developed new plans of the Round City of Baghdad.

His study was more related to the description, arrangement, and function of the city's main buildings, contrasting with the more urbanistic approach of Le Strange.

The lack of archeological excavations at the surmised location of the Round City means the task of reconstructing the Medinat al-Mansur is mostly a hypothetical exercise.