Iraq historical timeline

Origins

This is where writing was invented. Sumer, in the south, produced cuneiform around 3200 BC along with the wheel, the plough, irrigated agriculture at scale, the first cities and the sexagesimal counting that still divides an hour into sixty minutes. Akkad, Babylon and Assyria followed. Hammurabi’s law code, carved around 1750 BC, is among the earliest substantial legal texts anywhere, and the Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest long poem that survives.

Turning points

Arab armies took Mesopotamia in 637, and in 762 the Abbasid caliph founded Baghdad, which within a century was probably the largest city in the world and the centre of a translation movement that carried Greek, Persian and Indian learning into Arabic — and from there, eventually, back into Europe. The Mongol sack of 1258 ended that. Ottoman provinces followed, and after the First World War Britain assembled three of them into a mandate and then a kingdom in 1921. A coup ended the monarchy in 1958; the Ba’ath party took power and Saddam Hussein led it from 1979. The war with Iran, the invasion of Kuwait, thirteen years of sanctions, the American-led invasion of 2003 and the sectarian conflict that followed occupied the next three decades. ISIS took Mosul in 2014 and was defeated by the end of 2017.

Influential people

Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar II. Al-Mansur, who chose Baghdad’s site. Al-Khwarizmi, whose name became algorithm and whose book title became algebra. Faisal I, the kingdom’s first monarch. Saddam Hussein. And Grand Ayatollah Sistani, whose quiet authority has repeatedly shaped events since 2003.

Cultural evolution

Arabic and Kurdish are both official, and the Kurdistan Region in the north has run its own government since the 1990s. Najaf and Karbala are among the holiest places in Shia Islam, and the Arbaeen pilgrimage to Karbala draws crowds in the millions — by some counts the largest annual gathering of people anywhere on earth, walked on foot and fed by volunteers along the road. In the far south the Marsh Arabs live in reed houses on water that was deliberately drained in the 1990s and has been partly restored since. Iraqi maqam is a classical music tradition of its own, and there is an old saying in the Arab world that Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads.

Present-day significance

Oil supplies the great majority of government revenue, which leaves the budget exposed and the rest of the economy underdeveloped. The Tigris and Euphrates are both falling, dammed upstream and hit by drought, and water is becoming the defining domestic problem. Reconstruction continues in the north, and a very young population is the country’s largest asset and its largest pressure.