Euphrates
The longer river of Mesopotamia, cradle of cities
The Euphrates is the western of the two rivers that gave Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers, its name and its harvests. The longest river in western Asia, it rises in the mountains of eastern Turkey and runs southeast through Syria and Iraq to join the Tigris near the head of the Persian Gulf. Along its banks rose some of the first cities and writing systems on Earth, and its water still decides who eats and who goes thirsty across a dry and contested region.
The Euphrates runs about 2,780 kilometers from the confluence of its Turkish headstreams, the Kara Su and Murat. Through Turkey it cuts deep valleys now drowned behind a series of large dams — downstream it crosses the Syrian steppe and the Iraqi plain, where for thousands of years its floods and channels were spread by irrigation across Sumer and Babylon. In its lower reaches it loses water to evaporation and canals before meeting the Tigris at al-Qurnah to form the Shatt al-Arab, the brackish waterway that drains to the Persian Gulf.
The cities of Uruk, Ur and Babylon grew where the Euphrates could be tamed for farming, making its valley the setting for the invention of cities, law and the written word. In the modern era the river has become a source of friction: large Turkish and Syrian dams upstream can cut the flow that Iraq depends on, and droughts and diversion have shrunk it dramatically. Falling water levels have even re-exposed ancient ruins long hidden beneath reservoirs along its course.