العراق

Mesopotamia — the land between the rivers — is where the first cities were built, the first writing was pressed into clay, and the first written laws were set down. Sumer, Akkad, Babylon and Assyria followed one another across these plains over three thousand years.

With the Islamic conquest and the founding of Baghdad in 762, Iraq became the centre of the Abbasid Caliphate. The city's scholars translated, preserved and extended Greek, Persian and Indian learning, and its libraries shaped mathematics, medicine and astronomy for centuries.

Later came the Mongols, the Ottomans, British administration and the modern republic. Through all of it the rivers, the palm groves and the cities of the south kept their place at the centre of Iraqi life.

Babylon, Ashur and Hatra hold the remains of three of the ancient world's great capitals — the Ishtar Gate's city, the first Assyrian capital, and a caravan city whose circular walls turned back Roman armies twice.

Samarra preserves the ninth-century Abbasid capital and its spiral minaret, the Malwiya, while the Citadel of Erbil rises on a mound occupied continuously for perhaps six thousand years. The Ahwar of Southern Iraq — the marshes and the cities of Ur, Uruk and Eridu — combine both nature and archaeology in a single inscription.

The Iraqi Maqam is one of the most demanding classical vocal traditions in the Arab world, a repertoire of modes and poetry performed by a small ensemble and recognised by UNESCO as intangible heritage.

Poetry remains a public art, from the classical qasida to the colloquial verse of the south, and the table — masgouf grilled by the river, dolma, kleicha — carries its own long memory.

The Ahwar, the marshes of southern Iraq, are the largest wetland in western Asia: a world of reed islands, buffalo and water channels where the Marsh Arabs have lived for millennia. Drained in the 1990s, they have been substantially restored.

In the north, the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan rise to more than three thousand metres, with alpine meadows, gorges and villages that keep their own languages and traditions.