Iraq

From the first cities of Sumer to the modern republic on the Tigris and Euphrates.

Iraq occupies the heart of ancient Mesopotamia, the 'land between the rivers', where some of humanity's earliest civilisations arose. On its southern plains the Sumerians built the world's first cities and invented cuneiform writing, and successive empires — Akkad, Babylon, Assyria — flourished here before Persian, Hellenistic and Sasanian rule. After the Arab Muslim conquest of the seventh century, Baghdad became the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate from 762 and a brilliant centre of the Islamic Golden Age, until the Mongols sacked it in 1258. Following Ottoman rule and a British mandate after the First World War, the Kingdom of Iraq under Faisal I won independence on 3 October 1932; a 1958 republican coup, Ba'athist rule under Saddam Hussein, and a succession of wars since 1980 have shaped the modern state.