Iraq: The Cradle of Civilisation and the World's Oldest Cities
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Between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers — the land the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia — humanity invented writing, mathematics, astronomy, legal codes, and the city. Uruk, in southern Iraq, is the world's oldest city: a settlement of possibly 80,000 people by 3000 BC that produced the first known writing — cuneiform pressed into clay tablets — and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's oldest written story. Iraq is the cradle of civilisation in a literal, measurable sense.
The Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq — the Madan — built an entire civilisation on the vast wetlands of the Tigris-Euphrates delta, living in reed houses on floating islands and travelling by canoe through a landscape of water, birds, and reeds that had been continuously inhabited for at least 5,000 years. Saddam Hussein drained 90 percent of the marshes in the 1990s as a political act against a population that had resisted him. After 2003, the water was allowed back in and the marshes began to recover. The Madan returned. The reed houses are being built again.
Iraqi cuisine builds on ancient agricultural traditions: lamb, chickpeas, rice, flatbread, and dates — the date palm that has grown along the Euphrates for millennia. Masgouf — freshwater fish split and slow-grilled over tamarind wood on the banks of the Tigris — is the national dish, eaten at riverside restaurants in Baghdad as it has been eaten for centuries. The fish, the river, and the city have been in this relationship for a very long time.
